There's a version of speed coaching that looks like this: kids show up, you time them, you give cues, they run again, you compare numbers, session over. Repeat.
That version produces results. For a while.
But it doesn't produce the athlete who trusts the process when their times get slower. It doesn't produce the kid who comes back twice a week for six months. And it definitely doesn't produce the quiet middle schooler who hits 20 miles per hour, smiles once, goes home, and tells his mom it was the best day he's had in months.
That version of coaching takes something different. Matt Erdman figured that out. It just took him a few years.
From Badge to Barbell
Matt Erdman spent 14 years in law enforcement in Colorado before a shift in his assignment gave him something unexpected: flexibility. He used it to walk into a coaching program and quickly realized he didn't know what he was doing.
Most people would've walked back out. Matt stayed and learned.
After three years of building a coaching business alongside police work, he made the full pivot — packed up his wife, four kids, and everything they'd built in Colorado, and moved to Scotts Bluff, Nebraska to plant roots and build Veritas Athletic Performance from scratch.
Why Nebraska? Family. Community. A slower pace that matched what he wanted for his kids as they grew up. Eight months in, he says he couldn't have asked for a better transition.
The name Veritas is Latin for truth. And it comes from three places.
First, faith. John 14:6 — "I am the way, the truth, and the life." Second, law enforcement. Truth was always the anchor. It didn't matter what you felt or what you assumed. You had to find the facts. Third, training. The bar weighs what it weighs. Ten yards is ten yards. You either can or you can't. Right now. Truth doesn't negotiate.
That philosophy runs through everything he does on the track.
The Stopwatch Doesn't Lie. And That's the Point.
Most kids think they know how to run. They've been doing it their whole lives. And they're not wrong, they run. But running and sprinting efficiently are two different animals entirely.
When Matt started coaching speed, he knew he needed an objective anchor — something that couldn't be argued with. So he invested in a timing system early. Not to collect data for data's sake, but to hold himself accountable and give athletes something real to work with.
Here's the problem: you can make someone look faster without actually making them faster. Smoother mechanics, better posture — all of it can register visually as improvement while the clock tells a different story. The timing system cuts through the noise.
But here's what the timing system also does: it creates the moment every speed coach dreads. The athlete makes a mechanical adjustment, runs their next rep, and goes slower. Not a lot slower. But slower. And they look at you like you just told them to run with their eyes closed.
This is the coaching moment. And it's where most kids either buy in or check out.
Why Getting Slower Means You're Getting Better
Matt's go-to is the baseball analogy. And it works.
Ask any athlete who's ever had their swing adjusted: how many pitches did you hit out of the next ten? The answer is never ten. Usually it's two or three. Because you changed something, and your body hasn't caught up yet. Your old pattern is gone. Your new pattern isn't automatic yet. That gap is uncomfortable — and it's exactly where growth happens.
Speed works the same way.
When a kid comes in running at their ceiling — running as hard as they possibly can with the mechanics they have — they're maxed out. The only way to raise the ceiling is to disrupt the pattern. New positions, new timing, new motor demands. And for a window of time, they're going to be slower.
The coach's job in that moment isn't to panic. It's to educate.
Matt frames it simply: "We're not making you slower. We're raising your ceiling. Right now you're learning. Once the new pattern locks in, you'll blow past where you were."
Once athletes hear that — especially when it's connected to something they already understand from their own sport — they get it. And more importantly, they stay.
The Phases of Acceleration (In Terms Any Athlete Can Understand)
Matt doesn't spend a lot of time on jargon with his athletes. They don't care about the academic language. They want to get faster. So he keeps it simple.
Drive phase (0–10 yards): Get out of the ground. Body angle low. Every step is about pushing the earth away. Think rocket leaving the launch pad — nose pointed up, and still accelerating.
Transition (10–20 yards): You're starting to come up. Not fully upright yet, but the body is rising out of that drive position. Acceleration is still happening — it's just changing shape.
Upright sprinting (20+ yards): For most sport athletes, top speed arrives around 30 yards. You're not in pure acceleration anymore, but the intent still has to be there. The airplane doesn't stop increasing speed just because it's off the ground.
The coaching language that makes this click: "Pop the clutch, explode, and keep attacking — even when it doesn't feel like you're still accelerating."
For track athletes, they push that top-speed window further out. For sport athletes, it's about maximizing what happens in the first 20-30 yards — because that's usually where the game is won or lost.
When Programming Stops Being the Most Important Thing in the Room
Ask Matt when conversations started mattering more than programming, and he'll tell you it should've happened in year one. He had the moments. He missed them.
He was too focused on how good the program looked.
Around year four, something shifted. He started realizing that connection isn't just a nice add-on to good coaching. It's the foundation that makes good coaching land.
Here's the reality: kids can access coaching at their fingertips in about 12 seconds. YouTube, Instagram, remote programs — the information is everywhere. What they can't get through a screen is someone who knows them. Someone who knows which sport they play, which position, whether they pulled their hamstring last fall, whether they bombed a test this morning, whether they have three siblings at home or none.
That context changes everything about how you coach.
Matt tells the story of a middle schooler at his facility — quiet kid, barely six words in a session, doesn't matter if there's three athletes in the room or ten. That's just who he is. Matt's personal goal with this kid: get him to smile three times. The kid doesn't know that. It's just Matt's internal target for connection.
Last session, this kid hit 20 miles per hour in his fly run. Matt was jumping around. The kid smiled. That's it. One smile.
And everyone around them is thinking: he should be more excited. Matt's thinking: he is excited. We're fine.
Mom texted that night to say her son couldn't stop talking about it.
That's what you miss when you're only watching the clock.
Punishment Culture and the Freeze Response
One of the sharpest moments in our conversation was when Matt talked about what happens when athletes are afraid to make mistakes.
The scenario is familiar: coach tells the team that mistakes in practice mean extra running tomorrow. Gassers, poles, whatever the punishment is. And in theory, that should sharpen focus, right? Raise the stakes?
Here's what actually happens: athletes freeze.
Not every athlete. But enough of them. Because fight, flight, and freeze are all responses to threat — and when the environment turns mistakes into punishments, some percentage of your roster is going to choose not to act rather than risk acting wrong.
And then you wonder why they look slow on the field.
"They played tight. They played afraid." That's how one of Matt's athletes described it. And no amount of conditioning fixes that. Because the problem isn't their legs. It's the environment you built.
The alternative isn't a soft environment. It's a comfortable one. Where athletes can come in, fail going 100 miles an hour, trust the feedback loop, and come back tomorrow to try again. Comfort and standards aren't opposites. The best training environments hold both at once.
Sports Don't Teach. Coaches Do.
Near the end of our conversation, Matt said something that stopped me cold, because he handed my own philosophy right back to me.
He said: "The sport has rules. It has expectations. But it doesn't teach you how to be a better person, how to work hard, how to handle failure. That's your coach. And if your coach makes excuses, flies off the handle, and doesn't take responsibility, guess what your athlete learns? The exact same thing."
Two athletes. Same sport. Same rules. Completely different experiences. Different people. Different outcomes.
The only variable is the coach.
That's the whole thing, isn't it? Speed is simple. You can measure it, track it, improve it. The technology is there. The research is there. The programming is available.
But the part that determines whether any of it actually sticks — whether an athlete trusts you enough to get slower before they get faster, whether a quiet kid comes back week after week, whether your athletes leave your program better humans than when they arrived — that part is people.
Speed is simple. People are hard.
And the coaches who figure that out are the ones who actually change something.
Raise the Game
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