What Is a Good Long Jump Distance?

August 12, 2026 · 6 min read

Long jump has a units problem before it has anything else. American high school meets mostly measure in feet and inches, college and international results are in meters, and recruiting standards are usually published in meters. Half the confusion about whether a jump is any good comes from comparing two numbers in different systems.

Useful anchors: 20 feet is about 6.10m. 22 feet is about 6.71m. 24 feet is about 7.32m.

The published college ranges

NCAA Division I: boys about 7.70m at the top to 6.80m at the bottom, which is roughly 25 feet 3 down to 22 feet 4. Girls about 6.50m to 5.60m, roughly 21 feet 4 down to 18 feet 4.
NCAA Division II: boys about 7.60m to 6.60m. Girls about 6.00m to 4.90m.
NCAA Division III: boys about 7.20m to 6.70m. Girls about 5.60m to 5.00m.
NAIA: boys about 7.20m to 6.10m. Girls about 5.70m to 5.20m.

So a boy jumping 22 feet is inside the college bands. A girl jumping 18 feet is too. Those are the numbers worth aiming at, and they are published rather than invented.

On "good distance for a 13 year old"

There is no official average by age, in this event or any other. Nobody holds representative data for a whole age group, only results from athletes who competed. Any age table you find was either scraped from meet results, which over-samples the athletes who race, or made up.

For a young jumper the number that matters is your own progression, and the one technical thing that separates beginners from everyone else, which is not leg strength.

The thing that adds distance fastest

Hitting the board without slowing down. Most young jumpers decelerate over the last three strides because they are aiming their feet at the take-off board. That costs more distance than any amount of extra squat.

Fixing it is a run-up problem, not a jumping problem: a consistent approach, checked and marked, run at a speed you can actually control. Athletes routinely add a foot or more without getting any stronger, purely by arriving at the board at full speed.

The second thing is that wind counts here too. A tailwind over +2.0 m/s makes a horizontal jump wind-aided, exactly as it does in the sprints. Plenty of athletes do not realize their personal best is a windy mark until a coach points it out.

Check yours

Put your best jump against every division on the standards page. It accepts feet and inches or meters, so you do not have to convert anything yourself. The long jump ladder on its own is here for boys and girls.