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Speed Progress

Speed Progress answers "is this athlete getting faster, and fitter at speed?" over a rolling 12-week window. It separates three genuinely different qualities so you don't mistake one for another.

Who can use it: admins and coaches.

How it's organised

Two controls sit at the top:

  • Scope — a Squad ↔ Player pill. Squad shows everyone at once; Player drills into one athlete (with a searchable picker and prev/next arrows).
  • Dimension tabs — Max Sprint Speed, Speed Endurance, Repeat Efforts. The same three tabs exist in both scopes.

Max Sprint Speed — the ceiling

How fast the athlete can go. The platform takes the 95th percentile of their per-session top speeds over the window (needs at least three sessions) to get a stable MSS that isn't thrown off by a single GPS spike.

  • Squad ranks athletes by ceiling against the squad median.
  • Player plots top speed per session over time with a trend.

If you've tested an athlete directly (a timed flying sprint), a coach can set a manual MSS override on their profile; Underdog then uses your figure instead of the auto-calculated one.

In Squad scope this tab carries a Ceiling ↔ Exposure sub-toggle. Ceiling is the ranking above; Exposure answers "who is overdue a top-speed effort?" — a swimlane per athlete across the window, one dot per session that reached ≥90 % of their MSS (near-max efforts at ≥95 % shown brighter), so you can see how often each player is actually hitting near-top speed. Each lane leads with a "N days ago" recency chip (green ≤7 days, amber ≤14, red beyond) and a 28-day exposure count, and the list sorts most-overdue-first — an action list for who needs exposing to top speed next.

Speed Endurance — the work-rate

How much fast running the athlete sustains — measured as individualised high-speed running metres per active minute. This is a work-rate, not a speed ratio, and that distinction is deliberate: a whole-session speed percentile just re-draws the ceiling and barely separates athletes, whereas work-rate spreads them widely and is independent of how fast they are.

The squad view is the key picture — a scatter of ceiling (x) versus work-rate (y), split into four quadrants by the squad medians:

  • Complete (high ceiling, high work-rate) — all-rounders.
  • Engines (modest ceiling, high work-rate) — workhorses; the conditioning target is to lift the ceiling.
  • Burners (high ceiling, low work-rate) — fast but sparse; the target is to sustain it.
  • Develop (low on both) — a development focus.

A delta (second half of the window minus first half) tells you who is trending up. The player view shows average work-rate, the delta, and a per-session bar chart coloured by session kind.

Repeat Efforts — repeat-sprint capacity

How well the athlete copes with bursts of high-intensity work clustered together:

  • RHIE bouts — sequences of three or more sprints with little recovery between them; a proxy for repeat-sprint capacity and match fatigue.
  • HRR60 — heart-rate recovery, the drop in bpm over the 60 seconds after a sprint (shown only for athletes wearing HR monitors). A bigger, steady drop signals good fitness; a downward trend can signal accumulating fatigue.

The tab hides itself when there are no bouts in the window. Squad scope ranks athletes by total bouts and by HRR60; player scope shows totals, the busiest session, and an HRR60 trend.

A worked example

Land on the squad Speed Endurance scatter. You spot a Burner — quick but low work-rate. Click into Player scope for that athlete, see their work-rate is rising across the window (positive delta) as conditioning takes hold, then check Repeat Efforts to confirm HRR60 is holding steady. Compare against a midfielder with similar top speed but higher work-rate to frame the conditioning gap.

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