<table> </table> L AWRENCE | Jake Sharp understood how it was going to work. Either he was going to be fast &#8212; exceptionally fast &#8212; or he probably wouldn&#8217;t ever play running back for the Kansas Jayhawks.</p><p>So, when he arrived on campus in June 2006, Sharp was determined to ace his first football test: the 40-yard dash. Chris Dawson, KU&#8217;s director of strength and conditioning, views a player&#8217;s first college 40 time as a &#8220;reality check.&#8221; He had seen plenty of guys like Sharp before. They begin to believe their inflated 40 times from high school, which are often altered to impress college scouts.</p><p>Sharp, one of the most decorated players in state history out of Salina, Kan., ran those 40 yards in 4.53 seconds. The clock must have been wrong.</p><p>&#8220;He was disappointed,&#8221; Dawson recalled. &#8220;I don&#8217;t have any doubt about it.&#8221;</p><p>It had been a slow couple of weeks for Sharp &#8212; at least for his standards. In the Kansas track and field state championships in late May, Sharp was favored to win the Class 5A 100 meters to cap his senior season at Salina Central. But he lost to Mill Valley&#8217;s Justin Woods &#8212; now a redshirt freshman running back at Kansas State.</p><p>Ask Sharp about that race today, and he turns serious.</p><p>&#8220;I think about it every day,&#8221; Sharp said. &#8220;I trained to be the 100-meter champion in Kansas for I don&#8217;t know how many years. I took second three years in a row, but I never really won it when it counted. That is something I feel very uneasy about. I&#8217;ll never be able to change that. That bothers me.&#8221;</p><p>You want to tell Jake Sharp that it&#8217;s OK, that everything turned out all right. But he wouldn&#8217;t listen anyway. Sharp would prefer to keep his failure to win the 100-meter state championship locked in his ever-growing treasure trove of motivational tools. At 5 feet 10, there have always been doubts about Sharp&#8217;s ability to be an every-down tailback in Division I-A.</p><p>Yet, here he is, carrying the ball twice as much as his closest competitor on the KU roster. In four Big 12 games, Sharp has carried the ball 75 times for 380 yards &#8212; an average of 5.1 yards per carry &#8212; and five touchdowns. He keyed KU&#8217;s comeback win at Iowa State with a 67-yard catch-and-run for a touchdown, and it&#8217;s no secret how he did it.</p><p>Speed.</p><p>Sharp has spent the last two years chipping away at that disappointing 40 time. In May, Sharp ran a 4.38 &#8212; down .15 seconds from his freshman year and the fastest on the team, according to Dawson. Safety Darrell Stuckey is second at 4.48, a full tenth of a second slower than Sharp.</p><p>To Sharp, that&#8217;s exactly as it should be.</p><p>&#8220;Speed is the No. 1 factor to my game,&#8221; Sharp said. &#8220;It&#8217;s why I&#8217;m able to play here.&#8221;</p><p>Dawson says crossing the 4.4 barrier is a rarer accomplishment than people know.</p><p>&#8220;You hear about a lot more people running 4.3 and 4.2 than truly do,&#8221; Dawson said.</p><p>Dawson knows better than anybody why Sharp has been able to cross that barrier. Sharp came to Kansas in top physical shape from his weight training at Salina Central, but he has taken it to another level at KU.</p><p>&#8220;The biggest thing about Jake I&#8217;ve noticed,&#8221; Dawson said, &#8220;some guys, they feel good, they work hard. They don&#8217;t feel good, they don&#8217;t work so hard. Jake doesn&#8217;t have bad work days. There might be days when he doesn&#8217;t feel as well, but you wouldn&#8217;t know it based on his work ethic.&#8221;