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Building a Team Where Every Brain Belongs: My Journey to Coaching a Neurodivergent-Inclusive Squad

🏉 When I first started coaching rugby, I thought my main job was to teach skills, plan training sessions, and get players match-ready. And sure, that’s part of it – but I quickly realised the heart of coaching isn’t just about drills and game plans. It’s about people. It’s about building a team where every player feels safe to be themselves, including those of us who don’t quite fit the “neurotypical” mould. I say “us” because I’m neurodivergent too. I live with ADHD, which means my brain is constantly buzzing with ideas, distractions, and hyperfocus in equal measure. It also means I’ve felt out of place in a lot of traditional environments. But rugby has always been different for me – it’s a space where I can channel that energy and be unapologetically myself. As a coach, I want to create that same space for every player who walks onto our pitch. What Inclusion Really Means to Me For me, inclusion isn’t a tick-box exercise or a trendy buzzword. It’s making sure that a kid who struggl...
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Coaches Aren’t Robots. We’re Human - and the Pressure to Be “Perfect” Is Breaking Us.

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  Somewhere along the line, coaching stopped being about people and started being about performance. Perfect sessions. Perfect behaviour. Perfect results. Perfect communication. Perfect resilience. And if you slip? If you get tired, frustrated, emotional, overwhelmed, unsure? That’s treated as failure- or worse, weakness. The modern coach is expected to operate like a machine. Always switched on. Always composed. Always motivating. Always learning. Always giving. Never cracking. But coaches are not robots. We’re human beings, and the pressure to be perfect is quietly burning people out. The Myth of the “Ideal Coach” There’s an unspoken image of what a “good coach” looks like: • Calm under all circumstances • Emotionally intelligent 100% of the time • Never reactive • Never unsure • Never affected by external stress • Always positive • Always available That standard isn’t just unrealistic - it’s impossible. Yet coaches are judged against it constantly. By...
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“It’s Not You, It’s My Brain: Coaching, Feedback, and RSD”

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  Being a rugby coach is a strange mix of hype speeches, clipboards, and wondering if your players actually understood what you just said about ruck technique. Add ADHD into the mix, and suddenly feedback- whether from players, parents, or other coaches can feel like a surprise tackle you weren’t braced for. And if you’re familiar with Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria (RSD), you know that sometimes even the gentlest “Hey, maybe try this next time” can feel like your entire existence has been red-carded. So let’s talk about it. What RSD Feels Like in Coaching RSD isn’t just “taking things personally.” It’s your nervous system going into full meltdown over a comment that wasn’t even meant harshly. It can feel like: • A sudden drop in your stomach when someone points out a mistake. • That hot, flushed embarrassment that makes you want to vanish into the nearest changing room. • A spiral of overthinking:  Do they hate me? Should I even be coaching? Maybe I’ll just become ...
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