Just the other day I was at the Calgary soccer dome watching my son play. It was a late start for his U17 game, so when I arrived early I caught a few minutes of a U15 boys match already in progress.

It didn’t take long to notice that kid.

Every parent knows him.

He always seems to have the ball as if a magnet resides in his shoe. He always seems to be open as if he has some kind of force field pushing other players away. He always seems to score the important goals, because he always seems to be in the right place at the right time.

Annoying, right?

What’s interesting is that when your own kid runs alongside him, they can often keep up — at least for a while. So if it’s not straight-line speed that separates him, why do fast kids slow down in games when it matters most? Why do some athletes lose their game speed under fatigue, pressure, or chaos, even when they look explosive in drills?

In the first few minutes alone, he scored twice. I went off to watch my son’s game, but later wandered back during a long injury stoppage. The second half was underway. I’d watched enough soccer to recognize the losing team’s halftime adjustments.

It didn’t matter.

He scored two more goals while I was watching.

The Real Question: Where Does Time and Space Come From?

So what is it about certain players?

Why do they always seem to have more time and more space — and just seem to be moving at a higher speed?

Why, when they receive the ball, does the game appear to slow down for them?

Because that’s really what we’re talking about here: the ability to find time and space.

And contrary to popular belief, it isn’t owned exclusively by the fastest athletes.

Speed Isn’t What Most People Think It Is

When people talk about speed, they usually mean one thing: how fast someone can run in a straight line.

But games don’t reward straight-line speed in isolation. Games reward the ability to arrive early, move efficiently, and make decisions under pressure.

Sometimes the fastest player wins. Often, they don’t.

Messi and Rice: When Game Speed Beats Raw Speed

Here’s what’s interesting about Messi: at his peak, he was clocked around 32.5 km/h. Fast — but five or six guys on any given pitch could outrun him in a straight line. Gareth Bale, Arjen Robben, even teammates could beat him in a sprint.

Nobody cared. Because Messi’s advantage was never top speed. It was when and how he used speed — elite acceleration timing, repeatability, the ability to change direction without losing the ball or his balance. He didn’t outrun defenders. He arrived before them. That’s game speed.

Jerry Rice is the same story from a different sport. He ran a 4.6-second 40 at the Combine — respectable, not elite. But he set up defenders with timing, hit speed when they were flat-footed, and here’s the part that matters most: his conditioning was so deep that his drop-off from rep one to rep forty was almost nothing. In the fourth quarter, when every other receiver’s battery was drained, Rice’s “average” speed became the fastest thing on the field.

He didn’t get faster. Everyone else got slower.

So What’s Actually Going On?

The difference between the dominant, explosive players and everyone else isn’t always obvious on a stopwatch.

That’s because we’re not dealing with raw speed alone. We’re dealing with game speed — and more specifically, what I call Adaptive Game Speed.

This problem shows up in every sport, at every level — and it’s the reason we built our Adaptive Game Speed framework.

The Battery: The Missing Piece

Every athlete has a battery.

Not a physical one you can see, and not just “energy” in the tired-versus-not-tired sense. It’s closer to their life energy — the total capacity they have to move well, think clearly, and adapt to stress on any given day.

That battery is constantly being charged and drained.

What drains it: school stress, social stress, late nights, poor sleep, hard training — especially when it stacks up.

What charges it: good sleep, confidence, appropriate training, being mentally engaged.

And because most of the athletes we work with are teenagers or younger, that charge can swing dramatically from one day to the next.

To see what I mean, picture this.

They’re not lazy. They’re not unmotivated. They’re not “not trying.”

The battery is simply drained.

Reaction time slows. Coordination drops. Decision-making narrows. From the outside, it can look like a lack of effort. From the inside, it’s a system running on reserve.

Once you start seeing this, you can’t unsee it. And it changes how you train athletes completely.

One Lesson Coaches Keep Relearning

There’s one more lesson about the battery that coaches — myself included — have to relearn over and over again.

Our expectations are often wrong.

I was reminded of this recently while working with the Girls Hockey Calgary AAA team. They were coming off a brutal weekend: three games in three days, Friday through Sunday, all on the road, and two of those games against the top-ranked teams in the province.

Higher competition. Higher stress. Travel. More games than usual.

On paper, this is exactly the kind of weekend that drains a battery.

So heading into our Tuesday night session, I was already preparing to pull the handbrake. I had visions of zombies walking into the gym — heavy legs, flat posture, low energy. I’d even prepared three versions of the session: a high-intensity option, a medium one, and a low one.

Then the team arrived.

They weren’t dragging themselves in. They were playing soccer. Laughing. Screaming. Moving freely. Everything I thought I’d see just wasn’t there.

When I showed them the three training options, more than 75% chose the high-intensity session.

As coaches, our job isn’t to impose our expectations. It’s to respond to what’s actually in front of us.

The Adaptive Game Speed Framework

This is how we organize all of this thinking at Jungle Athletics.

The Adaptive Game Speed framework shows how an athlete’s “battery” governs access to speed qualities in real games.

When the battery is full, athletes can express linear speed, acceleration, agility, and decision-making with clarity. As fatigue and chaos increase, the energy cost of movement rises, decision-making bandwidth shrinks, and speed becomes progressively less accessible.

What Game Speed Really Means

Game speed isn’t how fast you can sprint in a straight line. It’s how fast you can start, stop, and re-accelerate. Change direction under pressure. Track the ball and opponents. Make decisions while moving. Stay sharp late in games.

Research backs this up: a 2020 study in the Journal of Sports Sciences found that decision-making speed drops 20–30% under fatigue in team-sport athletes — even when raw physical speed is still there. That’s why speed must adapt: to fatigue, to chaos, to constantly changing situations.

Training that ignores this creates athletes who look fast in drills but slow when it counts.

Chaos in Action: The Tomo Story

Years ago, I was running one of my basketball players, Tomo, through a footwork drill. He had serious raw talent in agility and acceleration, but in games, it just wasn’t showing up.

I thought about it for a while and later started throwing tennis balls at him during the drill. At first he couldn’t deal with the new level of complexity — balls dropped everywhere, bounced off his head left and right. But as time went on, he started catching them. Eventually, I had two other coaches throwing balls from different angles. It was pure chaos.

Tomo started to thrive on it. His processing speed picked up, his reactions sharpened, and suddenly his play on the court transformed. That controlled chaos built his ability to handle real-game pressure.

The Three Layers of Adaptive Game Speed

Why This Matters for Parents

Many talented athletes don’t fail because they lack ability. They fail because they’re constantly overtrained, always tired, and operating with a drained battery — so their speed never fully shows up in games.

There was a phase where my son Max would dominate in practice — he looked great — but he would fade badly in matches. It turned out that spending 20 hours per week on his new smartphone wasn’t conducive to having a fully charged battery. His smartphone was replaced by a flip phone, and once we fixed that, his game speed exploded. No extra sprints needed.

I’ve seen it with dozens of other kids at Jungle too — when we prioritize the battery first, the speed shows up naturally.

Traditional programs push harder when athletes slow down. We do the opposite.

We manage energy first — then build speed on top of it. That’s how development actually works.

What That Tuesday Night Taught Me

That Tuesday with the girls hockey team taught me something I keep relearning: the question isn’t “what should we train today?” It’s “what can this athlete adapt to today — and still be better next month?”

When I watched 75% of them choose the high-intensity option after the worst weekend of their season, I knew the answer. Their batteries were full. The system was ready. So we trained.

That difference — reading the athlete instead of following the plan — shows up as fewer injuries, better consistency, faster long-term progress, and athletes who peak at the right time. Not too early.

The Bottom Line

Speed is not just a physical trait. It’s a system behavior. And systems only perform well when energy is managed properly.

That’s why Jungle Athletics is built around judgment over templates, readiness over volume, and long-term development over short-term hype.