I spend a lot of time thinking about how we support neurodivergent athletes. Between coaching, mental performance, and my doctoral research, neurodiversity has become one of those subjects that follows me around. I can be watching practice and suddenly find myself thinking about executive function and coaching pedagogy while everyone else is simply trying to play volleyball. Totally normal behavior.
Lately, one question has been bothering me: Are we sometimes doing too much?
Even typing that makes me uncomfortable. For years, neurodivergent athletes were expected to fit into systems that weren’t designed with them in mind. An athlete couldn’t remember a long string of instructions, so we said they weren’t paying attention. When an athlete became overwhelmed, we questioned their toughness. If they needed something explained differently, somehow that became a character problem.
We needed to get better at that. We still do. But as we learn to support neurodivergent athletes better, we also need to ask when an adjustment helps an athlete access learning and when it starts removing the struggle that produces learning.
Sometimes Hard Is Just Hard
Imagine an athlete learning a new skill. They can’t get it. They become frustrated. You explain it again, and they still can’t get it. Now they’re annoyed, you’re annoyed, and another athlete nearby has apparently forgotten everything they’ve ever learned about the sport.
Tuesday practice is going great.
If that athlete is neurodivergent, it’s tempting to interpret the struggle through that lens. Maybe working memory is overloaded. Maybe there are too many distractions. Perhaps the instructions weren’t clear enough. Any of those things could be true.
There’s another possibility, though. Maybe they’re learning.
Learning can be frustrating. Improvement doesn’t happen in a straight line. Athletes forget things, misunderstand instructions, lose confidence, and occasionally perform a skill they mastered yesterday as if they’ve just been introduced to the concept.
A diagnosis gives us important information about an athlete, but it doesn’t explain every difficult moment. Sometimes ADHD makes something harder. Sometimes the thing is simply hard.
That’s where this gets complicated.
Access Is Different From Ease
Suppose I’m explaining a new drill and an athlete consistently loses track after the third instruction. I could tell them to pay better attention. I could also repeat everything louder, which remains an oddly popular coaching strategy. Apparently volume has been curing working-memory limitations for generations.
Or I could change how I present the information.
I might demonstrate while explaining. I could break the drill into smaller pieces or put the rotation on a whiteboard. None of those adjustments changes what the athlete eventually has to do. The skill remains difficult and the performance standard stays the same. I’ve simply removed some unnecessary friction between the athlete and the thing I’m actually trying to teach.
That’s the distinction I’ve been wrestling with. Good support should help an athlete access the challenge, not automatically eliminate the challenge.
I’ve started thinking about this as an Accommodation Dial rather than an accommodation switch. A switch gives us two choices: accommodate or don’t accommodate. Real coaching isn’t that clean. A dial allows the amount of support to change based on the athlete, the skill, the environment, and what we’re trying to accomplish.
Support, Struggle, or Rescue?
An athlete learning a new offensive system might initially need diagrams, shorter instructions, repetition, and regular check-ins. Six weeks later, that same athlete might need less support because the system has become familiar. Another athlete might always benefit from visual instructions. That’s fine too.
The goal isn’t to remove accommodations until an athlete proves they can survive without them. That’s basically “figure it out” coaching dressed in nicer language. But I don’t think the goal should automatically be maximum support either.
The better target may be enough support to let the athlete meaningfully engage with the challenge while leaving them something to solve.
Think about an athlete who struggles with emotional regulation after mistakes. You see the spiral beginning, so you immediately step in, calm them down, help them reset, and send them back out. Sometimes that’s exactly what the athlete needs. But if we do it every time, when do they learn to recognize the spiral and use the reset themselves?
This is where I’ve started asking whether I’m providing support, struggle, or rescue.
Support gives an athlete access to something they couldn’t meaningfully access otherwise. Struggle gives them space to work through something difficult. Rescue removes the difficulty before they have an opportunity to navigate it.
The problem is that rescue usually looks a lot like caring.
Nobody enjoys watching an athlete struggle. Coaches want to help. Parents want to help. Mental performance professionals certainly want athletes to use the tools we’ve spent all that time teaching them. Our instinct is to intervene.
If we aren’t careful, though, we can become very good at preventing athletes from encountering the situations they’re supposed to be learning how to handle.
Sport will provide frustration whether we schedule it or not. Athletes will receive feedback they don’t like. Teammates will annoy them. Gyms will be loud. Schedules will change. Officials will occasionally make calls that appear to violate the rulebook and several basic laws of physics.
We can prepare athletes for those moments. We can’t remove all of them, and I’m not sure we should want to.
The Sweet Spot Moves
The more I think about this, the less interested I am in asking whether we’re giving neurodivergent athletes “too many accommodations.” That question quickly turns into an argument about whether we’re making athletes soft, and I don’t find that particularly useful.
A better question is what the accommodation is accomplishing.
If a visual reminder helps an athlete with working-memory challenges understand a rotation, we’re helping them access volleyball. The rotation itself hasn’t become easier. But if we’re constantly stepping in before that athlete can try strategies independently, we may be solving today’s problem without building anything for tomorrow.
That doesn’t mean the visual reminder eventually has to disappear. Maybe it doesn’t. It means we should keep paying attention to what the athlete needs and what they’re becoming capable of doing themselves.
The Accommodation Dial can move in both directions. Turn it up when an athlete can’t meaningfully access the challenge. As they gain the tools to wrestle with more of it themselves, dial the support back. If the environment changes or the demands increase, turn it up again.
Maybe that’s the part I’ve been missing. The sweet spot isn’t somewhere we’re supposed to arrive and stay. The sweet spot moves.
It changes with the athlete, the skill, experience, stress, environment, competition, confidence, and probably a dozen things we won’t know about when practice begins.
Our job isn’t to discover the perfect amount of accommodation. It’s to keep calibrating.
Leave Something for Them to Solve
I still believe strongly that we need to do a better job supporting neurodivergent athletes. We need clearer communication, better understanding of executive function, more awareness of sensory and emotional regulation needs, and much less reliance on labeling athletes as lazy, difficult, soft, or uncoachable when our methods don’t work for them.
But support and challenge aren’t opposites.
Change the instructions without automatically changing the expectation. Remove barriers that have nothing to do with the skill you’re teaching. Give athletes tools and then give them opportunities to use those tools. When they’re genuinely unable to access the challenge, turn the dial back up.
Perhaps the most useful question is also the uncomfortable one: Am I changing this because the athlete needs help accessing the challenge, or because I’m uncomfortable watching them struggle with it?
I don’t think we’ll always know the answer immediately. That’s probably okay. Good coaching has always required observing, adjusting, trying something, and paying attention to what happens next.
Support them. Challenge them. And leave something for them to solve.
~ Dan
If this kind of conversation interests you, I regularly add courses and training for coaches, athletes, parents, and leaders through the Soul Performance Academy campus. It’s another place where I’m continuing to explore how we can teach, lead, and perform a little better.
