This is not a lecture. This is a rare opportunity to be coached (if you wish to participate).

In this exclusive pre-conference practical, two of the most sought-after speed coaches in American sport take to the floor together to give attendees a hands-on experience of how Spellman Performance develops elite athletes from the ground up. Les Spellman and Cici Murray, who between them have prepared some of the most scrutinised football prospects in the country for the NFL Combine, will coach the group through the key physical and technical qualities that underpin explosive acceleration and multidirectional movement.

Expect to work through the drills, cues, and progressions that Les and Cici use with their highest-profile athletes, with both coaches on the floor delivering real-time feedback and instruction throughout. This is a session built around doing, feeling, and understanding, not just watching.

Attendees will leave with a clear framework for developing the underlying speed qualities that matter most, practical tools they can take directly into their own coaching environments, and an appreciation of how the Spellman Performance methodology translates from the combine setting into the broader demands of multidirectional sport.

Places are strictly limited. If you want to be coached by two of the best in the business, this is where you need to be.

Join us at the Brewdog Doghouse for a chance to get together with old faces and meet some new ones.

This presentation explores how transfer is built across three key change of direction actions: curved running, single-step angle changes, and deceleration-driven direction changes.

Rather than treating COD as a single quality, this session breaks down how each action places different demands on the athlete, and how practitioners can better align training to these requirements. We will explore when to bias speed or strength within training, and how these decisions influence movement outcomes.

The session will also provide a practical framework for progressing from isolated drills to more integrated, sport-relevant tasks, using jumps, plyometrics, and eccentric-focused strategies to drive meaningful transfer to performance.

Multidirectional speed is often trained as a collection of drills, but long-term athletic development requires a broader perspective. This presentation explores how LTAD principles can be used to guide the progression of multidirectional speed from youth through high performance, ensuring athletes develop the physical competencies necessary to maximize speed throughout their careers. Using the IMG Academy Tennis Athlete Development Model as a practical case study, attendees will learn how training objectives, coaching strategies, and exercise selection evolve across key stages of development. The session will demonstrate how movement competency, strength, power, coordination, and reactive ability are systematically developed before progressing to advanced multidirectional speed and sport-specific application. Participants will leave with a practical framework for designing age- and stage-appropriate speed training, including example exercises, programming progressions, and key decision points that inform when and how athletes should advance. While the presentation draws from a tennis-specific model, the principles and programming concepts are applicable across sports and competitive environments. Coaches will gain actionable strategies to better align daily training with long-term athlete development while building faster, more resilient athletes.

Technique is often discussed as though it is a fixed model to be identified, measured and corrected. In practice, it is far more complex. This talk will explore what we mean by technique, how it can be assessed, and how practitioners can decide which aspects are meaningful in a performance setting. With access to more technology and data than ever before, it can be difficult to know what to measure, what to trust, and what is genuinely useful. Some tools provide valuable insight, while others risk selling the promise of certainty without necessarily improving understanding or decision-making. The session will consider the difference between technical features that are simply observable and those that are functionally important. It will also address how we interpret change: when does a technical difference represent a real adaptation, and when might it reflect normal variability, measurement error, task constraints or context? Ultimately, the talk will encourage practitioners to assess technique more critically and translate information into practical coaching and performance decisions.

Multi-directional speed is so much more than planned change-of-direction drills paired with linear sprinting. In this session, Mike Young, PhD will present the practical framework that he uses to develop this essential capacity. He’ll take you through how he develops the foundational physical qualities of change of direction all the way through his processes for designing reactive drills that match or exceed the demands of sport. Drawing on his experience in elite track and field, professional football, and team-sport performance, Mike will explore how activities like plyometrics, resisted locomotor activities and medicine ball throws can build the general capacity for stiffness, braking capacity, force orientation, and re-acceleration that underpin effective multi-directional movement. He will then show how coaches can progress from structured tasks into games and mini-competitions that add intent, decision-making, and adaptable movement solutions. Attendees will leave with practical methods to select, sequence, and coach these activities across different training environments, moving beyond isolated drills to create athletes who can brake, redirect, react, and compete at speed.

In this presentation, Tom will bridge the gap between laboratory research and field-based application, focusing on how to develop faster, more robust multidirectional athletes. The presentation will be structured into three core pillars:

1. Biomechanical & Neuromuscular Demands: An exploration of the physiological and mechanical constraints underpinning elite multidirectional movement.
2. Technical Frameworks: An analysis of evidence-based technical models for change of direction and deceleration, providing a framework for movement optimisation.
3. Performance & Mitigation Strategies: Practical, evidence-based methods to enhance multidirectional speed while systematically mitigating injury risk in athletes.

When NFL athletes arrive at EXOS, every session has to count. And few physical qualities are more important, or more poorly trained, than the ability to decelerate under pressure.

In this session, Nic Hill pulls back the curtain on how he approaches deceleration development with some of the most scrutinised athletes in professional sport. He’ll walk through how he structures and progresses a deceleration programme across a typical off-season block, from early-phase movement quality work through to high-intensity, sport-specific expression.

But this isn’t just a programming talk. Nic goes deep on the coaching craft itself, the cues that actually land with NFL athletes, the drills he keeps coming back to and why, and how he uses gamification to drive intent and competition without sacrificing movement quality.

A rare insight into how deceleration is developed and coached at the highest level, with practical tools you can take back into your own environment.

Training one elite athlete for the NFL Combine is one thing. Training twenty, thirty, or fifty at once is an entirely different challenge, and one that most coaches are underprepared for. Cici draws on her experience coaching large groups across youth, high school, and elite settings to present a practical framework for delivering high-quality multidirectional speed sessions at scale. From how to structure your environment and organise your drills, to how you distribute your attention without letting standards slip, Cici breaks down the decisions that separate a chaotic session from a productive one. She’ll also share which drills thrive in a large group setting, which ones fall apart, and why. If you coach multidirectional speed in a team environment, this session will change how you plan and run every session going forward.

This is for those attendees that buy a ticket, speakers and Platinum and Diamond partners

Join us at the Brewdog Doghouse for a chance to get together with old faces and meet some new ones.

Having a fast 10m time or being able to turn 180* quickly doesn’t necessarily mean you will ‘look fast’ when it comes to the game. Being able to access and utilise those physical capacities at the right moment, at the right time is how athletes with a PhD in their sport separate themselves from the competition. Pete will show how working with technical coaches, applying skill acquisition research and using basic physiological principles can develop athletes gamespeed in a way that transfers to the game. Delving deep into examples from a range of sports, he will show how he uses his ‘Prep, Perform, Play’ framework to aid him in speed & agility session design to maximise learning and training transfer.

Jan has built a player development approach around a simple but often overlooked truth: no two players move the same way.

Coordination patterns, training history and movement tendencies differ enormously across any squad and in professional football, where time and energy are finite, generic speed and agility work isn’t good enough. Jan will explain how he uses individual player profiles using coordination training to identify exactly what each player needs, and how those findings shape individual development plans with targeted exercises and specific training interventions.

Precise, practical and built for the realities of elite football.

Football is a multidirectional sport, but most individual training is still planned and monitored with linear metrics. Running volume, high-speed distance and sprint exposure tell us how much players run, but not the directional movement patterns they are exposed to. This presentation will introduce a practical framework to better assess and prescribe multidirectional running loads using a new generation of GPS-derived mechanical metrics. Through examples from on-pitch rehabilitation and post-match individual compensatory training, it will show how movement signatures, cutting angles, curvilinear running and mechanical work can be monitored and progressed throughout the return-to-performance process. The session will also present a new run-based compensatory training concept designed to better reproduce the directional demands of football when ball-based training is not possible. Together, these approaches provide practitioners with directions to design, monitor and audit both rehabilitation and compensatory sessions, ensuring players are exposed to the movement patterns that matter most before returning to competition.

In this roundtable, a panel of practitioners from across sport come together to unpack how multidirectional speed is built, layered, and progressed in young athletes as they move through the developmental pathway.

From foundational movement competency to sport-specific application, the discussion will explore how coaches can sequence acceleration, deceleration, change of direction, and reactive agility work in a way that respects long-term athletic development without sacrificing performance outcomes along the way.

Expect a practical, cross-sport conversation covering what “foundation” really means at different ages and stages, common mistakes in early speed development, and how to build multidirectional capacity that transfers when it matters most.

Whether you work with grassroots youth or elite academy athletes, this session will give you frameworks and coaching insights you can take straight back to the field.

Deceleration is arguably the most important quality that a multidirectional speed athlete can possess for enhancing on-field movement performance and injury-resilience. Despite this performance profiling has historically been focused on assessing sprint acceleration and top speed capabilities, neglecting the necessity to be able to decelerate. Damian has pioneered the development of new deceleration testing protocols and performance metrics and in this session he will discuss some of the latest insights into how practitioners can go about accurately profiling deceleration and braking performance in applied field-based environments. Attendees will walk away with practical, elite level examples of how high-performance teams assess deceleration and braking performance to revolutionise multidirectional speed development.

We will explore the future intersection between what a coach says and what an athlete does. Focusing on its application to speed, we will examine the role of coaching language and the influence it has on motor skill learning. To stand on opposites sides of a river, our words must form a bridge.

All conference attendees will be allocated tickets to the WSL game between Manchester City Women and Arsenal Women. This is completely optional.