1: I think for athletes at our level who start training late Aug or early Sept - with all the short sprints in spikes, speed change drills, 60’s, heavy weights etc takes it toll on the body. We are talking about 18 weeks of fall prep follow by indoor and outdoor season, this is a long time of doing tons of high intensity work and even with decent therapy you will have some type of injury. I think if the L2S program is setup correctly and not doing dumb shit like 16x200 twice a week etc the athlete will stay healthy, even if there’s periods of higher volume, I still like the odds of the L2S athlete staying healthy. Don’t worry about the “so call” lack of speed work because if the strength program is good and there’s sled-hills-starts and plenty of races the athlete will be fine. Remember at the NCAA level there are many races to get high quality speed work in.
2: Yes I do agree that training groups helps with motivation etc, but if you have hard working athletes and the coach assign times to the workouts most likely the athlete will hit those times. For example, in the early weeks of training those 200-300’s workouts were tough but I knew I had to hit the times. Once again it comes down to having a decent training setup, if you are having a 11.0 sprinter doing 10x300 in 46 with 4mins you may be asking for trouble even with a training group vs having him do 4x300 47 with 6-7mins rest manageable with or without a group.
3: I may be wrong but I do think the longer sprinters 200-300m does play a role in allowing the athlete to handle more in terms of race volume etc. Maybe it’s better to get the high intensity work from the meets anyways, because like FOG mention before how fast are you really sprinting in workouts anyways? The lower intensity or sub-max workouts would allow you to work on other elements of your race plan (relaxation which is lacking from most lower level sprinters etc). I also think by going easier in workouts you are lessening your chances of injuries, if you gonna get injured at least let it be on race day.