Chapter Previews
Why Organized Sports Matter?
Organized sports shape physical health, emotional regulation, social competence, and academic performance. These gains are not incidental. They come from structure, repetition, and social participation, and they extend into adulthood when sports environments do not push athletes out.
Neurodiversity and Athletics
Neurodiverse athletes bring strengths in pattern recognition, focus, creativity, and problem-solving. They also encounter sensory, communication, and executive function barriers that coaching systems rarely acknowledge. Whether those differences disable or enable depends on the environment, not on the athlete.
Defining the Problem
Most coaching education assumes neurotypical behavior. Evaluation methods rely on inference, metaphor, and social decoding. Sensory environments overload athletes. Neurodiverse players are removed, disciplined, or they leave. The pipeline does not leak — it ejects.
Principles of Inclusive Coaching
Trust, predictable structure, concrete communication, and individualized approaches keep athletes in the sport. Inclusive coaching is not lowering standards. It is removing irrelevant difficulty so that training effort is spent on the sport, not on decoding the coach.
Understanding the Neurodiverse Athletic Experience
Adrenaline, proprioception, spatial awareness, sensory load, and executive function affect performance in ways coaches rarely see. Many athlete problems are not motivation problems. They are processing problems that can be coached differently.
Closing the Gap
The change is not heroic. It is procedural. Most exclusion is the byproduct of unexamined bias. When coaching changes, retention changes. When retention changes, development changes.