Tkaberna:
Couldn’t you do both, to an extent, with athletes that young?
They are probably hitting top speed no later than 30m, probably earlier. If you are doing 2 days a week of work to 30m and then 2 days of ext. tempo and maybe 1 day of int. tempo, you should see all around improvement. Most people, especially younger athletes, are running the speed work so much slower than their meet times, I don’t see it as being that necessary to run a bunch of 60s to get them ready to go if they are that novice/new to the sport.
Perhaps you could get the most improvement by keeping training quite simple like that and using meets to generate that sort of specific SE, especially since they are so young and in HS you run numerous meets (just counted mine from senior year a few weeks ago and I had nearly 40 races going into the state meet!).
Example: Having athletes run more 100s, 200s, and 4x100s early in their HS careers and then slowly incorporate them into more 4x4s and open 4s. If weather isn’t bad, you could even do that each season. You may have issues with order of meets (we always had the 400 immediately before the 4×100, so you couldn’t safely do both), but you get the idea.
Thoughts?