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How to Build Speed Hurdles for the Wicket Drill

Blog| ByMario Gomez

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Wicket Drill

Coaching is expensive. It consumes your personal time and bank account. We get paid in personal satisfaction, passion, happiness, competitiveness, and growth. However, our bank statements only reflect withdrawals for expenses and tiny amounts of monetary deposits for work. If you break down a coach’s stipend and divide it by the amount of hours spent on work, it most likely averages to pennies on the hour. Coaching is a labor of love. Increasingly, budgets are being reduced, particularly in sports like track and field.

If this situation describes you, you have to be creative with spending. Speed Hurdles are not cheap. A new set of six can cost as much as $40. Adjustable ones are even more costly. We tried using small cones or disc cones, but they didn’t have the same benefit as actual wickets. The solution: build your own wickets. This article serves as a practical guide in creating wickets in a frugal and simple manner. It outlines how we created 20 wickets for less than $2.00 apiece. You can change the dimensions to create wickets for whatever purpose is desired.

The next article, Part 2, discusses how we use the wickets, with special emphasis on the different spacing according to the skill levels of your athletes and the time of season. In the meantime, grab the spare change in your savings jar and build your first wicket!


Video 1. How to build speed hurdles for the wicket drill.

Total Materials

  1. Five 10-foot-long PVC pipes, half-inch width (5x$2.18 each pipe = $10.90).
  2. Forty 90-degree half-inch elbows (40×22 cents per elbow = $8.80).
  3. 40 half-inch PVC insert fitting Ts (40×48 cents apiece = $19.20).

Materials for Each Wicket

  • One 14-inch length PVC pipe
  • Two 6-inch lengths PVC pipe
  • Two PVC T fittings
  • Two 90-degree PVC elbows

Construction

  1. Cut one 14-inch piece of PVC pipe to use as the crossbar (top) of each wicket. Next, cut 19 more equal pieces, using the first length as a model. This accounts for 280 inches of the 10 PVC pipes, leaving 420 inches.
  2. Cut one 6-inch pipe segment to serve as a guide for the posts (sides) of each wicket. Then cut 39 more equal pieces. This uses another 240 inches of the PVC pipe. That leaves 80 inches of unused PVC pipe, which you may be able to use elsewhere.
  3. Use two elbows, one at each end of the 14-inch crossbars, to join the crossbars with the 6-inch posts and form the top and sides of the wickets.
  4. Insert a T at the bottom of each post to serve as the base of the wicket.
Six inch post with measurement
Figure 1. Cut the 1/2″ PVC into 6″ and 14″ sections.

Speed Hurdle
Figure 2. Final assembly of the speed hurdle.

After building the first set, we created 40 more wickets so we could have three different settings to accommodate all skill levels within our program. It added slightly to the overall cost but the added benefits are invaluable.

Since you’re here…
…we have a small favor to ask. More people are reading SimpliFaster than ever, and each week we bring you compelling content from coaches, sport scientists, and physiotherapists who are devoted to building better athletes. Please take a moment to share the articles on social media, engage the authors with questions and comments below, and link to articles when appropriate if you have a blog or participate on forums of related topics. — SF

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Mario Gomez

Mario Gomez is the girl's track and field head coach at Captain John L. Chapin High School in El Paso, TX. He has coached track and field for 15 years, with the last nine years at Chapin. He has also coached football, basketball, cross country, and most recently, his son's 8U coach pitch baseball team.

Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. Barry Haworth

    May 29, 2018 at 5:26 am

    First, I love this. The best ideas are often ones you notice and think, oh wow, why didn’t I think of that?!! Thanks for this! I now have a summer project, haha.

    I have a few questions. The width looked a little tight, so I double checked the width on other speed hurdles and noticed several commercial ones that were about 18 inches across. Just curious why 14 inches and not 16 or 18 inches? Probably a dumb question, but I assume they still work fine?

    Also, I assume an inexpensive way to have a wide variety of heights at low cost is to not cement in the 14 inch section into the PVC elbows and simply have different sets of 6 inch, 8 inch and 10-12 inch side pieces that connect to the 14 inch section? I’m also asking in terms of storing these PVC hurdles.

    Again, this is great stuff though, thanks for the article!

    Reply
  2. Kathleen

    August 9, 2024 at 10:15 am

    Great idea. Thanks!

    Reply

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