About the Book
Why this book exists?
Many neurodiverse athletes leave sports not because they lack ability but because the systems around them were not built with them in mind. Practices, rules, evaluation methods, and coaching habits assume one way to learn, one way to communicate, and one way to behave.
This produces preventable attrition at every level of the pipeline. Changing the coaching input changes the athlete outcome.
Lack of Neurodiversity in current coaching education
Coach education programs rarely include neurodiversity. They assume that all athletes process language, sensory input, instruction, and feedback the same way. They do not teach how to adapt communication for athletes who do not infer intent from tone or metaphor. They do not train coaches to recognize when a “behavior” is a sensory or executive function response to the environment, not defiance. Current curricula focus on rules, drill design, and sport-specific mechanics.
- They do not address the environmental and communication barriers that push neurodiverse athletes out.
- They do not measure retention as an outcome.
- They do not acknowledge that losing athletes is a coaching failure, not an athlete failure.
- They focus on deficits and not accommodations.
What this book adds that did not already exist
Existing coaching materials treat neurodiverse athletes as edge cases, assume clinician involvement, or focus on awareness instead of instruction. They do not translate research on neurodiversity into repeatable coaching practice. They do not explain how exclusion is produced by standard methods. They do not show how to change coaching without creating separate programs.
This book closes that gap. It treats inclusive coaching as a skill that belongs in the core of coach education, not as a side topic. It connects what is known from research to what coaches do on the field. It defines exclusion as a design outcome, not a personal failing. It offers methods that retain athletes without lowering expectations or restructuring leagues.
Evidence behind the book
Organized sports improve physical health, emotional regulation, social competence, resilience, attention, and academic performance. These effects are documented across dozens of peer-reviewed studies in pediatrics, sports science, psychology, education, and disability research. Those gains apply to neurodiverse athletes when they are not excluded. Exclusion is driven by coaching practice and system design, not by lack of ability in neurodiverse players.
The book draws from empirical work on childhood development, neurodiversity, sensory processing, executive function, coaching science, social models of disability, and long-term outcomes of youth sports participation. It shows how traditional coaching fails not because neurodiverse athletes cannot meet expectations but because environments and instruction are designed for a different cognitive profile.
The book treats exclusion as a structural outcome rather than an individual failure. It traces how training pipelines assume neurotypical behavior, how evaluation relies on inference and metaphor, and how sensory and communication barriers go unnamed. The claims in this book are documented, not speculative. The research exists. It has not been applied to coaching.
A fully cited references section containing over 200 references is included.
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