Coaching Designed For Neurodiversity
Coaching neurodiverse athletes fails more often than it succeeds. Not because athletes lack talent. Because the people who lead them are not trained to teach them.
Organized sports profoundly shape physical well-being, emotional resilience, social competence, and lifelong health. Yet neurodiverse athletes are routinely pushed out by programs that assume neurotypical behavior and communication.
Why this matters?
Over 60 million American children play organized sports under the direction of 8 million volunteer coaches. Twenty percent of those children are neurodiverse. Very few coaches receive training on neurodiversity. Many traditional coaching methods do not apply to neurodiverse athletes. As a result, neurodiverse athletes are excluded from a place with physical, social, and psychological benefits and many never return.
Inclusive coaching does not lower standards. Inclusive coaching is removing unnecessary barriers so every athlete can reach their potential.
What this book delivers
Organized sports are crucial for child development across physical, social, emotional, cognitive, and lifelong habit-building domains. Twenty percent of athletes are neurodiverse, yet coaching methods and systems are built for neurotypical assumptions. Neurodiverse athletes are pushed out not because they lack ability but because environments, expectations, and coaching habits are not designed for them. Changing how we coach changes which athletes stay in sports and who benefits long-term.
What you will be able to do after Reading?
Explain why organized sports matter for neurodiverse athletes in evidence based terms.
Identify where exclusion is created by coaching habits instead of athletic ability.
Apply inclusive coaching methods without lowering performance expectations.
Redesign team and program practices so neurodiverse athletes stay instead of leave.
About the Author
Sheri Byrne-Haber has coached, mentored, and worked alongside neurodiverse people in high-stakes environments for two decades. She has coached inside programs with no neurodiversity training and watched athletes leave not because of skill but because instruction was inaccessible. Their work in accessibility and systems design is cited across industries and has been implemented at scale in large organizations. The conclusions in this book are based on lived proximity to exclusion and on published empirical research, not opinion.
Are You Ready?
If you want neurodiverse athletes to stay in sports, coaches must be taught to coach them. That change will not happen on its own. It will not happen by waiting for policies. It will not happen by hoping that the next season is different. It happens when the people who run programs bring different instruction, not different athletes.
Pre-order this book if you want:
- inclusion to be a coaching skill rather than an after-the-fact repair.
- the benefits of sports to reach the athletes who are being pushed out by the way we coach now.
- To stop losing neurodiverse athletes for preventable reasons
- To get practical changes that can be applied in live practices
- To shift sports culture away from blaming the athlete for design failures
- To build teams that retain talent instead of filtering it out