THE SCIENCE
Your fastest student might be your worst runner.
A stopwatch tells you who got there first. It doesn't tell you how. Here's why the quality of a student's running matters more than their time.
Timothy Starkey
PE teacher and founder of Huddl · 4 min read · October 2026
A few years ago I taught a very athletic Year 6 cohort. There were several genuinely fast sprinters in that group, kids with the potential to go a long way in athletics, and it was one of those cohorts you don't forget. One student stood out more than the rest. She was the fastest runner in the school and won almost everything at interschool carnivals. But her technique was unusual. Her arms flailed above her head, she ran almost upright as if she was leaning back, and her knees came up unusually high. She was tall with long legs, and that stride carried her a long way.
When it came to assessing her running, I was torn. Against the biomechanical criteria, I couldn't justify anything better than a C. Her mechanics were inefficient by any measurable standard, and yet she was crossing the line well ahead of students who looked textbook by comparison. When she and her classmates found out she'd been given a C, they were genuinely shocked. That moment changed how I think about assessment.
Are we assessing the outcome or the movement?
The same tension shows up across almost everything we teach. A student can launch a drop punt 40 metres with poor technique and a tail wind behind them, while another kicks a technically beautiful punt that travels 25. Who gets the better mark? And should the distance count at all?
Outcomes are easy to fall back on. They're quick to record and there's no arguing with a stopwatch. But a stopwatch only tells you what happened. It says nothing about how, and in a school setting the how is almost everything we're trying to teach.
Speed and technique are different things. A stopwatch only sorts students from top to bottom. It can't tell the two fast groups apart.
Process and product aren't the same
Researchers draw a clear line between process-oriented assessment, which looks at the quality of a movement, and product-oriented assessment, which measures the result. When Stephen Logan and colleagues compared the two across children of different ages, they found the relationship between them ranged from weak to strong depending on the skill and the age group. A good result doesn't reliably mean a good movement pattern, particularly in younger children.
Technique isn't just about looking tidy, either. A study of 97 runners at Loughborough University found that running technique explained around 39 percent of the differences in running economy between runners, and around 31 percent of the differences in performance. Two runners can travel at the same speed while one of them works far harder to do it.
Same time, very different runners. Example results for two students who both ran 50 metres in 8.9 seconds. A stopwatch would grade them the same.
Why it matters more in school
Children's movement patterns are still forming, and they're shaped by the feedback and practice we give them. A fast student with inefficient mechanics is often running fast in spite of their technique, not because of it. If we only reward the time, we miss the chance to fix the pattern while it's still easy to change. We also send a message to the student who runs beautifully but isn't naturally quick that technique doesn't count.
Where Huddl fits
This is the problem that eventually led me to build Huddl. Skill Grader deliberately looks at how a student runs, not how fast. It measures seven parts of the running action, from stride length ratio and cadence to torso lean, knee drive, foot strike, elbow angle and stride symmetry, and scores each one against thresholds for the student's year level.
It doesn't replace your judgement, and if you disagree with a result you can change the grade. What it gives you is objective evidence of the movement itself, so the conversation with a student, a parent or a colleague is about how they move and what to work on next.
The fastest student in your class deserves feedback too. Sometimes they're the ones who need it most.
SOURCES
Logan, S. W., Barnett, L. M., Goodway, J. D., & Stodden, D. F. (2017). Comparison of performance on process- and product-oriented assessments of fundamental motor skills across childhood. Journal of Sports Sciences, 35(7), 634–641.
Folland, J. P., Allen, S. J., Black, M. I., Handsaker, J. C., & Forrester, S. E. (2017). Running technique is an important component of running economy and performance. Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise, 49(7), 1412–1423.
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