Speed of Play
Why Fast Teams Aren’t Always Quick Teams
There is a phrase that lives on every sideline in hockey. You have heard it. You have probably shouted it yourself. “Speed it up!” And every time a coach says it, most players hear the same thing: run faster. Move your legs. Get there quicker. But here is the uncomfortable truth that keeps nagging at anyone who has watched enough high-level hockey to know the difference. The fastest teams are not always the quickest teams. And the quickest teams are not always the ones sprinting the hardest.
Think about the last time you watched a side that genuinely looked like they were playing a different sport. Not because their athletes were faster, although that helps, but because the ball seemed to arrive before the defence had finished thinking. The passes were early. The movement was timed, not frantic. The decisions were made before the pressure arrived. That is speed of play. And it has almost nothing to do with how fast your outside midfielders can cover fifty metres. Speed of play is the product of three things happening in the right order: decision speed, ball speed, and movement timing. When all three align, a team looks impossibly quick. When only one is present, usually physical pace, a team looks busy but not dangerous.
So why do so many coaching programmes still confuse pace with speed of play? Partly because pace is visible and measurable. You can time a sprint. You can track metres per minute on GPS. But you cannot easily measure how quickly a midfielder read the pressure, chose the forward option, and released the ball before the defender arrived. That invisible speed, the speed between the ears, is what separates teams that run fast from teams that play fast.
TL;DR
Speed of play in field hockey is not about running faster. It is the combination of decision speed, ball speed, and movement timing. Scanning and pre-decision are the real accelerators. Ball speed through techniques like the hit pass changes the defensive picture faster than any player can sprint. And session design can train all of this without adding a single fitness drill. If you want your team to play quicker, coach the brain and the ball, not just the legs.
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The Three Dimensions of Speed in Hockey
Let us start by pulling apart what speed of play actually means. It is not one thing. It is three things that either compound each other or cancel each other out.
The first dimension is decision speed. This is how quickly a player recognises the situation, selects the best option, and commits to it. Robert Noall’s work on on-ball decision making is the clearest articulation of this. He separates the process into two distinct phases: prescanning, which happens while the ball is travelling to you, and on-ball decision making, which happens the moment you receive it.[1]
The critical insight is that these are not the same skill. A player can prescan beautifully and still freeze on the ball. Or they can be brilliant at reading pressure in the moment but never look up before the ball arrives. The fastest decision makers do both, and they do them so quickly that defenders are always responding to the last picture, not the current one.
The second dimension is ball speed. This is how fast the ball travels from one player to the next, or from a player into a dangerous area. It is the most underrated accelerator in the game. A crisp, flat pass that arrives at pace does something no amount of running can replicate: it moves the defensive picture before defenders can shift their weight. Fede Tanuscio makes a compelling case for the hit pass as a forgotten weapon precisely because of this. A short-grip hit, executed without breaking stride, skips entire defensive lines in a way that a push or a sweep often cannot match.[2]
The ball simply travels faster than feet. And when a team consistently moves the ball at high speed, the cumulative effect is that the opposition is always a half-second behind the play.
The third dimension is movement timing. This is not about how fast a player runs. It is about when they start running, and where they run to. Russell Coates describes this brilliantly in his work on third man combinations: defenders naturally ball-watch, and the third man exploits that by timing a run into the space the defender has just vacated.[3]
The run does not have to be fast. It has to be on time. A perfectly timed walk into space can be more dangerous than an explosive sprint into a clogged channel. Movement timing is also deeply connected to off-ball principles. If players understand where to position themselves before the ball arrives, they do not need to cover as much ground when it does.
When all three dimensions align, hockey looks effortless. The ball arrives early, the receiver already knows what to do with it, and the next player is already moving into the space that just opened. When they do not align, you get what most of us have seen too many times: a team that runs hard, passes sideways, and wonders why the circle entries never come.
Why Scanning and Pre-Decision Are the Real Accelerators
If you could only coach one thing to make your team play faster, it should not be fitness. It should be scanning.
