Neuroinclusion in high-performance sport
There's no normal baseline to return to.
Support for neurodivergent athletes has been built for a temporary state. This paper introduces Power's State-Trait Mismatch Hypothesis and shows, with field evidence from the Australian Institute of Sport and Paddle Australia, what changes when coaches design for neurodivergence as a lifelong trait.
Impact measured from Neuroinclusive Peak Performance™ training and the 2024 AIS workshop it grew from
rise in coach knowledge and confidence at Paddle Australia, seven weeks after a single neuroinclusive performance training session
Paddle Australia coaches described a concrete change in how they coach after neuroinclusive training
of surveyed Australian Institute of Sport participants asked to build on their introductory session with further training
Lane 1
The athletes already here
Elite sport selects for intensity. It rewards the athlete who can lock onto one cue for hours, who feels the change in the water a stroke before anyone else, and who is drawn to repetition and risk.
Many of those athletes are neurodivergent. Estimates for the general population sit at around 15 to 20 percent (Doyle, 2020). Within sport, the athlete-led group Neurodiverse Sport suggests the figure could reach 60 percent among elite athletes (Neurodiverse Sport, n.d.). That higher figure is a community estimate and is yet to be confirmed empirically. It still points somewhere worth looking.
Sport may attract the very profiles it's least set up to sustain.
The research has barely begun. A 2023 scoping review found only 23 peer-reviewed studies on neurodiversity in elite sport worldwide, most of them focused on ADHD in American college athletes (Hoare et al., 2023). The athletes are already in the system, and the evidence base hasn't caught up with them.
So the question for every high-performance program is practical, and it starts long before anyone has a hard week.
Was the environment built to fit these athletes from their first day, so their profile can contribute to performance from the outset?
Or does support switch on only once they start to struggle?
Lane 2
The mismatch
Most high-performance programs place support for neurodivergent athletes inside their wellbeing and mental health infrastructure.
On paper, that makes sense. It's where the expertise, the referral pathways and the budget already sit, allocated under older, traditional models of what athlete support is for. In practice, that support usually looks like a referral to the sport psychologist, a run of counselling sessions, a wellbeing check-in, or a lighter training load until things settle. Housing neuroinclusion there means it quietly inherits that system's logic, a logic built for a different kind of difference. This paper sets out to challenge it, because mental health and neurodivergence aren't the same thing.
Mental health describes a state that can shift over time, while neurodivergence is a trait: how a person is wired for life.
Both are real, and one athlete can carry both at once. Some mental health conditions are long-term or recurring, and the state column describes how episodic needs are typically supported, rather than every mental health experience.
The mismatch
When state-based support is applied to trait-based needs
- It arrives late, after the athlete has already struggled
- It stays temporary, ending once things look settled
- It aims for a baseline that was never theirs
- The athlete gets read as the problem, while the environment stays the same
It's like building a bike with no seat-height adjustment, then coaching the rider on technique every time their knees hit the handlebars.
The hypothesis · Power, 2026
Power's State-Trait Mismatch Hypothesis
Neuroinclusive adjustments in high-performance sport have largely been designed around mental-health, state-based assumptions, which treat difference as a temporary departure from a baseline to be restored.
Neurodivergence is neurodevelopmental and trait-based. When state-based support is applied to a lifelong trait, adjustments arrive late, stay temporary, and aim to return the athlete to a normal baseline that was never theirs.
Every athlete has their own baseline. The mismatch lies in measuring them against a neurotypical one.
There's no normal baseline to return to.
Four things this does and doesn't say
Neurodivergent athletes have hard days like anyone else, from fatigue to sensory overload to shutdown. The hypothesis argues that support has been designed for this state layer alone, leaving the trait layer, which needs standing and proactive design, largely unaddressed.
Co-occurring mental health conditions are common among neurodivergent people (Katzman et al., 2017; Lai et al., 2019), and when they arise, state-based care is the right tool. The concern is where that tool has been pointed. Applied to neurodivergence, it tends either to aim at fixing a neurodevelopmental difference, or to refer it out as something to be managed away from training and competition, as though an athlete could leave their own nervous system and brain at the gate.
Psychology has distinguished temporary states from enduring traits for decades. What this paper adds is the observation that sport has designed its neuroinclusive supports as though neurodivergence were a state, when it is a trait.
Other examples of mismatch thinking, such as the double empathy problem (Milton, 2012), locate difficulty in the fit between people rather than inside one person. This hypothesis is narrower and practical. It looks at the support model inherent to elite sporting associations and bodies to date.
It's offered as a hypothesis because it's a testable claim. The field evidence in this paper is consistent with it. Testing it directly, with athlete-level outcomes tracked over time, is the next piece of work, and research partners are welcome.
Research partners
Want to help test this hypothesis in your program, or cite it in your own research? I'd love to hear from you.
Lane 3
Designing for the trait
This section builds on The state-trait mismatch. Start there if you haven't read it yet.
If the difference is lifelong, the design has to be too.
Trait-fit design draws on a long line of person-environment fit research, which shows that people perform and stay well where the environment matches how they're built (Kristof-Brown et al., 2005). In a coaching context it starts with one reframe, developed with coaching staff and refined across both engagements in this paper.
Coaches often read an unusual behaviour as a red flag that something must be wrong with the athlete. Neuroinclusive Peak Performance (NIPP) coach training, which I designed and deliver, replaces that reflex with a broader curiosity: what might be going on around the athlete to prompt this behaviour? That shift is what we call red flag to curiosity. The findings in this paper, and the hypothesis itself, grew out of delivering that training.
The behaviour shift coaches practise in NIPP coach training
A concerning behaviour becomes a data point. The coach's question moves from what's wrong with this athlete? to what's missing in this environment, for this person, right now?
Around that reframe sit the pieces that make it usable: the social and psychomedical models of disability, the labels and everyday language used about athletes in high-performance sport, and the deficit assumptions that language can carry, Universal Design so that good coaching doesn't wait for an athlete to share a diagnosis, and psychological safety as a two-way practice, built from the coach's capacity for discomfort and the athlete's willingness to be honest.
None of it requires a label. A better question changes the environment before anyone has to explain themselves.
Lane 4 · Field evidence
Paddle Australia, 2026
At the request of Matt Murphy, I delivered the first Neuroinclusive Peak Performance (NIPP) coach training session, the approach described in Designing for traits, to Paddle Australia's performance team at the Gold Coast campus on 26 February 2026. Survey respondents included a head coach, a performance coach, two strength and conditioning coaches, two sport scientists, a team manager and physio and medical staff, with between one and more than twenty years of experience.
About the sample
The surveys were anonymous and voluntary, and not every item required a response, so the number of coaches answering varies from measure to measure. Eight coaches completed the pre-training survey and six completed the post-training survey, which coach travel pushed out to seven weeks after the session. Four could be matched across both. Each figure in this section is reported against the number of coaches who answered that item.
Collecting in-the-room data in an elite setting, with high-performance demands competing for coaches' time, is a real-world constraint, and these numbers are best read in that light.
Knowledge and confidence, before and after
Mean across 13 items, rated 1 to 7. All 13 items moved upward.
Source: Paddle Australia training impact report, session 1 (Sesame Seed Pty Ltd, 2026), p. 5
Biggest item gains
Mean change, after minus before (7-point scale)
Source: Paddle Australia report (2026), p. 5
How coaches rated the session
Mean rating out of 5
Applying new strategies scored lowest of the four, which is typical in the first weeks after training. For new habits to stick, training design has to account for the real-world learning needs of coaches juggling multiple competing demands, with follow-up, peer discussion and practical tools they can use on the day.
Source: Paddle Australia report (2026), p. 5
coaches who completed the pre-training survey rated their motivation to learn at 7 out of 7 before the session began
the largest individual gain, from a coach who arrived with low confidence (mean knowledge and confidence score across 13 items, rated on a 7-point scale)
coaches who responded to this post-training survey item flagged their own possible neurodivergence as something they now wanted to explore
one coach in this system shapes the environment for fifty or more athletes. That multiplier is why a train-the-trainer approach was the starting point: change how one coach designs the environment, and it changes for every athlete they work with.
Source: Paddle Australia report (2026), pp. 3, 6–7
How the training impacted the coaches: what they shared
"Taking more time to observe and consider the behaviours of all athletes, not just those who are labelled as neurodivergent, and adapting my approach accordingly."
Paddle Australia coach
"Recognising emotional responses can be releases of energy and not necessarily something is wrong. What I did differently: not rush to fix the situation."
Paddle Australia coach
"The training made me aware of how much of an impact I can have as support staff on shaping an athlete's environment and adapting my communication style to suit them."
Paddle Australia support staff
What this shows
Five of the six coaches who completed the post-training survey described concrete changes to how they coach in the weeks after the session. They were asking athletes more open-ended questions, taking time to reflect before responding, and treating emotional responses as information instead of something to fix straight away.
These are the habits practised in the session, and they match what the hypothesis predicts: a hard moment read as a signal about the environment. One support staff member also realised that shaping an athlete's environment was part of their role too, and not only the coach's.
Lane 5 · Field evidence
Australian Institute of Sport, 2024
In 2024, two years before the Paddle Australia session, I designed and delivered the same underlying work for the Australian Institute of Sport: a two-hour in-person workshop for around 60 wellbeing engagement team leads, a coaching workbook every attendee kept, and two follow-on coaching sessions for key leaders.
How the data was collected
Around 60 wellbeing engagement team leads attended the workshop, and 25 of them completed the pre and post workshop surveys. The surveys combined five-point rating items on confidence and understanding with open-text questions, and the open-text answers were grouped into themes.
Because the open-text questions let people answer in their own words, a single answer often raised more than one idea. Someone might mention both a lack of knowledge and a lack of time, for example, and that answer was counted under both themes. Respondents didn't pick from a list. The percentages below show the share of respondents whose written answer mentioned each theme, so they don't add up to 100, and they're best read as a measure of how prominent each concern was in the room. They aren't a single-choice vote. Not every respondent answered every question; the final question on future learning, for example, drew eight responses.
On the five-point rating items, participants' confidence and understanding moved in a positive direction on every measure the survey asked about.
Every rated measure moved up
- Understanding neurodiversity and different neurotypes
- Understanding neurodiversity in elite sport
- Confidence identifying barriers and adjustments
- Seeing how neurodivergent strengths contribute to performance
- Knowing what support avenues and opportunities exist
asked to build on the introductory session with further training, before the engagement had closed
Source: AIS Workshop Impact Report (2024), workshop impact ratings
Before: what held back confidence in supporting neurodivergent athletes
Share of respondents naming each barrier
Source: AIS Workshop Impact Report (Sesame Seed Pty Ltd, 2024), pre-workshop themes
After: how understanding of neurodiversity in sport changed
Share of respondents describing each shift
Source: AIS Workshop Impact Report (2024), post-workshop themes
The open-text answers carried an early signal of the mismatch. Before the session, one participant described the confidentiality around neurodivergence, held between athlete and psychologist, as one of the things that made support hardest to navigate. Another asked where this work sits at all, and when it tips into counselling. Both describe support housed in a clinical, state-based channel, out of reach of the people who shape the daily environment.
What participants shared
"Very thought-provoking about what I can do and my sport can do to be mindful of this group of people."
AIS participant, after the workshop
"How much systemic change needs to happen."
AIS participant, after the workshop
What this shows
Participants arrived mostly wanting knowledge and tips for supporting individual athletes. After the session, some were already looking at the system around those athletes as something ready to be reimagined.
Once the trait is visible, the environment becomes the obvious place to act, and an opportunity for elite sport to lead the way in the future of human performance.
Lane 6
What holds across both
These findings draw on Evidence: Paddle Australia and Evidence: AIS.
- Capability moves fastKnowledge and confidence rose in both organisations after a single session, on pre and post surveys designed for this work.
- Behaviour followsAt Paddle Australia, five of six coaches described changing how they coach within weeks. They moved from rushing to fix a hard moment to pausing, asking open questions and reading emotional responses as information.
- Demand compoundsAfter an introductory session, 82.7 percent of AIS training attendees who completed the survey reported they wanted to go further with their learning. At Paddle Australia, every respondent named at least three topics where they, too, wanted to deepen their learning and applied knowledge.
- The lens turns inwardIn both rooms, staff began to recognise themselves and their colleagues in the material, and then the system they share. Neuroinclusive design serves the athletes, and it also serves the natural variation of minds among the coaches and staff who support them.
Limitations and future directions
What this paper doesn't claim
These are small samples: four matched coaches at Paddle Australia and 25 respondents at the AIS. Both are self-report, and both rooms arrived motivated, which helps delivery and limits what the data can say. Both set out to measure an opening session rather than a full, best-practice program. Read together, they're consistent early field evidence pointing the same way twice. They aren't a controlled trial, and the athlete-outcome case is one of many valuable next pieces of work to build.
The survey instruments were designed by the author, who also delivered the training, which makes some bias inherent and unavoidable in the reporting. To the author's knowledge, neuroinclusive coach training in elite sport hadn't been evaluated in this way before and no known validated measure could be sourced at the time, so the items drew on available research from neighbouring fields. They haven't been empirically validated. Validating them, or adopting an established measure as one emerges, is a recommended step for future evaluation, alongside independent data collection and athlete-level outcomes tracked over time. This work requires collaboration with interested academic partners. To express your interest, please contact the author.
Peer review and critique are welcome, and encouraged as best practice. This paper is offered as a best possible start from a solo practitioner, written with its limitations in view and a commitment to keep improving the work as resources allow.
Lane 7
What this could look like in your organisation
The state-trait mismatch isn't confined to sport.
In most workplaces, adjustments for neurodivergent staff are routed through wellbeing and employee assistance channels and switched on after someone struggles. That's the same state-based logic, applied to the same lifelong traits. Sport is where the evidence in this paper was gathered. The principle travels to any team where performance depends on the full range of minds already in the room.
About Mariane
Mariane Power is a behavioural scientist, former clinical psychologist and neuroinclusive leadership and systems strategist.
She works across elite sport and corporate Australia, helping the people who shape environments design them for the full range of minds already in the room. She is the founder of Sesame Seed Pty Ltd and creator of the Master Your Magic® leadership program for neurodivergent leaders and founders.
Mariane is also a late-diagnosed ADHD professional and mum to a mixed-neurotype family, committed to building a more inclusive world for generations to come. She hosts the Jagged Brilliance video series and writes the Naked Purpose newsletter.
Bring this work into your program
Everything in this paper happened inside a normal training calendar. The same approach can start with a single session or grow into a full train-the-trainer program, for institutes, academies, codes, clubs and corporate teams.
Want to bring inclusive impact to your organisation? Contact Mariane directly.
I also coach a small number of neurodivergent leaders and founders one to one, the individual version of the same work. More at marianepower.com.au.
Lane 8
Cite, share and reference
How to cite this paper (APA 7th edition)
Power, M. (2026). Designing for difference: There's no normal baseline to return to. Power's state-trait mismatch hypothesis, with field evidence from the Australian Institute of Sport and Paddle Australia (Version 1.0). Sesame Seed Pty Ltd.
References
- Doyle, N. (2020). Neurodiversity at work: A biopsychosocial model and the impact on working adults. British Medical Bulletin, 135(1), 108–125. https://doi.org/10.1093/bmb/ldaa021
- Hoare, E., Reyes, J., Olive, L., Willmott, C., Steer, E., Berk, M., & Hall, K. (2023). Neurodiversity in elite sport: A systematic scoping review. BMJ Open Sport & Exercise Medicine, 9(2), Article e001575. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjsem-2023-001575
- Katzman, M. A., Bilkey, T. S., Chokka, P. R., Fallu, A., & Klassen, L. J. (2017). Adult ADHD and comorbid disorders: Clinical implications of a dimensional approach. BMC Psychiatry, 17, Article 302. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12888-017-1463-3
- Kristof-Brown, A. L., Zimmerman, R. D., & Johnson, E. C. (2005). Consequences of individuals' fit at work: A meta-analysis of person–job, person–organization, person–group, and person–supervisor fit. Personnel Psychology, 58(2), 281–342. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1744-6570.2005.00672.x
- Lai, M.-C., Kassee, C., Besney, R., Bonato, S., Hull, L., Mandy, W., Szatmari, P., & Ameis, S. H. (2019). Prevalence of co-occurring mental health diagnoses in the autism population: A systematic review and meta-analysis. The Lancet Psychiatry, 6(10), 819–829. https://doi.org/10.1016/S2215-0366(19)30289-5
- Milton, D. E. M. (2012). On the ontological status of autism: The 'double empathy problem'. Disability & Society, 27(6), 883–887. https://doi.org/10.1080/09687599.2012.710008
- Neurodiverse Sport. (n.d.). What and why. Retrieved August 2026, from https://www.neurodiversesport.com/what-and-why
- Sesame Seed Pty Ltd. (2024). AIS workshop impact report: Universal design and inclusion to win well [Unpublished client report].
- Sesame Seed Pty Ltd. (2026). Win Well impact report, session 1: Coaching neurodivergent athletes at Paddle Australia [Unpublished client report].