Sprints are a very good way to develop speed for athletes from almost every sports.  With sprints, you can use a whole variety of starting positions as progressions to improve agility and reaction time in different sport specific positions. 

This one is coming from my good friend and colleague Kevin Neeld, and it is called a Side Falling Lunge Start.  We use this starting position for sprints with a lot of our athletes. 

You want to take a big step forward, drop as low as possible into a lunge position and immediatly explode out of the lunge position into a sprint in an opposite direction.  We usually cue the athletes to make the transition as quick as possible.

It is a great way to improve their reaction time, their agility and their transitional speed as it teaches them to quickly change direction as they need to move to one plane of motion to another.  And when you think about it, it is as sport specific as it gets, as almost any team sports requires athletes to quickly change direction.