Study bids to break down barriers to coaching children with autism

 Photo by Stephen McCarthy/Sportsfile

A study into the coaching of young people with autism in community sports has revealed that education about the development disability remains a major challenge.

As part of her doctorate in Mary Immaculate College, Kate O’Brien interviewed 13 Irish coaches across eight individual sports - archery, athletics, kickboxing, rowing squash, surfing, swimming and tennis.

While O’Brien’s work predominantly focused on what is working, what can be improved and the ideal, the sense of apprehension among coaches about doing or saying the wrong thing came across strongly.

“Something I couldn’t ignore throughout all the interviews was this overarching sense of trepidation among coaches,” remarked O’Brien. “That came out two-fold, this fear and uncertainty. Coaches, with regard to parents sharing the diagnosis with them, perceived parents to be very frightened of the exclusion of their child.

“In some cases, coaches said that parents told them that they had previous bad experiences and they wanted to see how their child got on now. Coaches also said it was a real taboo, a hush-hush topic for them. They were worried about doing something wrong.

“They were really worried about the language and frequently corrected themselves about what they were supposed to say - ‘are you supposed to say autistic?’, ‘are you supposed to say autism?’ They were worried about offending people and that ties into education.

“I suppose they were saying ‘I don’t know too much about autism but I’m interested and if I go into it I don’t really want to be pigeonholed and known as the coach for autism’, which is an interesting one. They want it to be something they can do but not to be defined by it.” 

O’Brien’s work was supervised by Dr Órla Slattery, Dr Niamh Kitching and Dr Richard Bowles. As the Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) was only redefined in 2013, she completely understands that awareness of it is also in its infancy. “The language is the big thing. I didn’t have too many coaches who knew, I think it was a cluster of terms they put together.

“One of my coaches, for example, spoke of the strengths attached to autism and the number of athletes who have autism. But there is also ADHD (Attention Deficiency Hyperactivity Disorder) and there is confusion in the terms.

“When clubs had previous disabilities experience, I would have seen coaches who had experience from Cara (Sport Inclusion Ireland) or professional disability experience as a teacher, referencing how young and new it is and inclusive education as a model that sport could be based upon in the future. That was really interesting. That’s where I would have seen awareness in people that it was so new but other than that it was coaches being overwhelmed in that it being a recent explosion in the last few years.” 

O’Brien points out that training coaches to assist young people with autism is proven to be beneficial to the coaches in the main. “Not that the interviews were a teaching experience for me in giving something back but what I would see a lot in their research was coaches who have disability training you’re becoming more well-round coaches.

“What we hear with disability training, when the athlete doesn’t understand the first time, you don’t repeat it in the same way. You’re changing your language or you’re reducing your language particularly with something like autism and relying more on visuals. There is actually evidence that your coaching is actually enhanced by focusing particularly on what we’re looking at autism and coaching.” 

O’Brien hopes to expand her work by speaking to young people with autism who weren’t included in her study because of the stresses of Covid. Putting techniques and aids into practice interests her too.

“The GAA would be a great next step because the work they’re doing is so incredible,” she said, referencing ASD Cúl Camps. “We could learn so much from what they’re doing and they are the centre of so many communities, fortunately. We could learn how to use that and that would be on a larger scale and different because I have been looking at individual sports.