Don’t be afraid to be creative with your relay order.
The unwritten rule is to start a relay with your second faster runner, hand off to your third fastest, followed by your fourth fastest, and bring it home with your fastest. And, honestly, if you hold true to this, I really can’t fault you, but there’s no reason to be a slave to it.
The biggest reason to anchor with your stud is exactly that – they are your stud, your gamer, the runner most likely to rise to the challenge of a close race or to be undaunted by trailing by a seemingly insurmountable margin. I do tend to stick to this one in the 4×400 and 4×800, but if my stud is fairly consistent and another runner needs that end-of-race adrenalin to really get them moving, I’ll make a switch in a heartbeat.
In the 4×100, however, I almost never run my stud 4th. Here it comes down to math. The most my stud can run on the 4th leg is 110m if they take the baton at the very beginning of the exchange zone. I like to put them second where they can run 120m (theoretically) by taking it early in the zone and giving it late. You can’t get too cute, of course, or you’re just asking for trouble with a zone violation. [Full disclosure: my girls did get DQ’d at regionals this year, but it wasn’t a consequence of running our stud second].
If I had a solid and fairly balanced group of 4×400 or 4×800 runners, I would even suggest running slowest to fastest. You can hang with the pack early and steamroll everyone late in the race.
One story that I like was in the 3A boys state 4×400 in 1997. Cheney had Drew Thalmann on the anchor (3A state record holder 300H and 4×400), so the challenging school ran their boys fastest to slowest to get as far away from Thalmann as possible. It definitely made for an exciting finish when Thalmann overcame the approximately 50m deficit (as I remember it), but I always admired the creative way they tried to hold him off.