Last week I hosted a workshop for a small group of coaches on the Universal Design for Coaching framework (Every Brain on the Team: Neurodiversity-Informed Coaching workshop). These are my favorite conversations to have. The coaches were vulnerable, open, and brought great questions and scenarios.
Two distinctions keep coming back to me from that night.
- Sherlock vs. Judge
- Accommodations vs. Adjustments
Sherlock vs. Judge
Sherlock as in Sherlock Holmes. I love reading Sherlock Holmes stories and watching detective movies and TV shows. I always admire how curious these characters are. They keep gathering information until they see the whole picture, test their theories, and, when appropriate, adjust their point of view.
A judge, by contrast, looks at the information they are presented with and makes a judgment.
As coaches working with athletes, we want to be Sherlock, not the judge.
This is part of the internal system in the Universal Design for Coaching framework.
It starts with understanding your assumptions, defaults, and how you tend to show up when you’re feeling dysregulated. This is the first step to observing and creating an environment where all of your athletes can thrive.
A chef who loves heat will keep making chili too spicy for the table until they realize their mild isn’t everyone else’s mild.
When an athlete frustrates you, are you Sherlock or the judge?
Now, the internal system is a slippery little sucker. It can be really difficult to catch yourself in the moment. For most coaches (except maybe Ted Lasso), judgment is usually their instinctual thought after an observation.
You know you've slipped into judgment when you assume intent. The thoughts or words could sound like:
- They’re lazy.
- They’re being disrespectful.
- They don’t care.
- They’ll never understand the plays.
- They’re not focused.
If you’ve thought any of these, that’s fine. The goal isn’t to eradicate these thoughts; it’s to catch yourself quickly enough that you don’t act from that place.
Knowing your own “coaching pet peeves”
Again, the goal is not for your athletes to stop getting under your skin. The goal is to know your “coaching pet peeves” well enough to recognize when you’re about to become dysregulated and have an unhelpful reaction: labeling, yelling, punishing, or dismissing.
For example, I was always quick to pick up plays. Show me once, and I got it. So now, when I coach athletes who have a hard time remembering plays or understanding what’s going on in a drill, I know I can get frustrated quickly.
I’ve learned to notice the feeling as it starts. It’s a tightness in my body. Once I feel it, I use it as a signal and remind myself: this is the moment to get curious instead of frustrated. So I ask myself:
- Did I ask enough questions?
- Do I know how they learn best?
- Did they understand what I just said?
- Did I overload them with information?
- Did I communicate it effectively, or did I assume it was obvious?
- Where did I lose them?
Those questions put me back in Sherlock mode. From there, I can actually see what’s happening instead of reacting to how I’m feeling, which can easily turn into labeling athletes as being unfocused, lazy, etc.
I recommend you make your own list. What behavior pattern in an athlete gets under your skin fastest? What’s the physical sensation in you when it happens? What are the questions you want to be asking in that moment instead?
I’ve included a PDF at the end to help you think through these.
Is there a certain way athletes should be behaving?
One of the moments I keep coming back to from the workshop is a coach saying some version of this:
“I want them to understand the information, but I also think they should be able to do it this way. The standard is the standard.”
This coach loves teaching the game: the breakdowns, the concepts, and the technical pieces. But her athletes just want to compete. She could feel the tension between wanting to teach it her way and seeing in real time that she was losing them.
There’s a pull between “I want to meet them where they are” and “but there are things they just have to be able to do.”
If you have said any version of that to yourself, I invite you to get curious about it.
Ask yourself: why do they have to know this specific thing, specifically this way?
Sometimes the answer is: because it’s a foundational skill of the sport. If I can’t rebound, I can’t play. That’s not negotiable, and now it’s about coaches teaching in a way that is accessible to their athletes.
But sometimes the answer, if you sit with it, is:
- Because that’s how I was taught.
- Because that’s what my coach did.
- Because that’s just how we’ve always done it.
Whenever I find myself thinking something has to be done a specific way, I remind myself of the cake story.
The cake story
Someone bakes a cake, and every time, before serving it, they cut the sides off. One day someone asks: “Why do you always cut the sides off?”
The baker says, “Because that’s how my mom made it.”
The mom says, "Because that’s how my dad made it."
Grandpa says, “What do you mean, cut the sides off? Our pan was shaped that way.”
Coaching is full of cake-cutting. We run drills because those are the drills our favorite coach would do. We enforce standards because they were enforced on us. We default to teaching styles because we were taught that way, and it worked for us, and we never questioned whether it would work for anyone else.
This isn’t an overhaul of everything you’ve ever known; it’s opening your eyes to different ways of teaching, realizing that every brain works differently, and setting up your environments so every brain on your team can thrive. Not just the ones that are most like yours.
A note on what’s in between
Before we get to the second distinction…
Between “catch yourself in judgment” and “make an adjustment,” there’s a middle step: noticing. What is this athlete actually doing? What might be going on underneath their behavior?
Is this a processing issue? Are they overloaded with sensory input? Is their nervous system in fight-or-flight? Are they stuck between understanding the instruction and executing it?
I’ve written a series on this called “What should I be looking for?” (parts 1 through 5), where I walk through what coaches commonly observe and what those behaviors might mean. If this post leaves you asking “yes, but what am I actually supposed to be looking for?” that series is where to go next.
The two distinctions in this post are the bookends. The noticing is the work in between.
You can find those posts here (part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5).
Accommodations vs. Adjustments
When I think of accommodations, I think of the school system. Like when someone is allowed extra time on a test.
Often I feel like coaches think I’m suggesting they make 15 accommodations for all 15 athletes on their team. My head spins just thinking about that. It would be overwhelming to implement.
On the other hand, an adjustment is one change that can support all of the athletes in front of you. Think of it as an experiment. Sometimes the adjustments you make don’t support your athletes, and that’s fine. The coach’s job is to observe and adjust constantly. You’re tinkering all the time.
One adjustment most coaches probably already make is to explain a drill verbally and have some of their athletes walk through it while everyone else watches. You’re giving the information in three different ways, which helps athletes who process information verbally, those who process it by physically walking through it, and those who prefer to see it visually.
Two adjustments that came up in the workshop were.
One coach noticed her athletes love to compete. So she aims to run about 80-90% of practice in some competitive form. Everything that can be a game is a game.
She struggled in moments when she felt there was no way to make it a competition.
The adjustments I suggested for her to try were:
- Displaying the time for the “boring” drills on the clock so athletes know how long they have to stay focused.
- Chunking the more teaching-heavy sections into 7-10 minute blocks.
Another coach shares the practice plan ahead of time. She writes it on a whiteboard before practice so her athletes can see what’s coming when they walk in. For some athletes, knowing what to expect takes a load off their nervous system. For everyone else, it’s a nice-to-have. Again, this change meets a specific need while helping the whole group.
Accommodations are the last resort. An athlete who is sensitive to sound might need to wear noise-canceling headphones while they’re warming up for the game because you can’t turn the music down. We turn to these when we can’t make the environment or our teaching work for that athlete, or when we have two contrasting needs on the team.
Why these two go together
The internal (Sherlock) is how you see what’s actually happening with your athletes. The external (adjustments) is what you do about it. Judgment skips both: it jumps straight to a decision based on an assumption, then designs practice around that assumption instead of the athlete in front of you.
Imagine an athlete, Sam, who never seems to understand the drills. Whenever we have a new drill, and it’s Sam’s turn to go, in our head we think, “Here we go. They’re going to screw it up.” If they get through it, we're surprised but categorize it as a one-off. If they mess it up, even slightly, we get immediately frustrated. Then, our confirmation bias kicks in, and we usually either yell at them or ignore them. Instead of getting curious about why they seem to be a step behind, we write them off, put them in a box, and everything they do confirms what we already believe.
The goal is to catch yourself when you move into judgment, bring yourself back to curiosity, notice what might be going on underneath their behaviors, and design environments that work for more brains on your team.
A great place to start is with the PDF below.
Tip: click any word to jump the reader to that point.