Neurodiversity Celebration Week was 18-24 March and it aims to seek ways to help change how neurodivergent individuals are perceived and supported.
Why is this important in sports?
Having neurodiverse people around us can sound scary as you have to think about how can you make your sport easier to learn and still have a whole lot of fun.
A football team could find that it actually helps their team because of the way that the neurodiverse person/people think when playing and scoring a goal. This may be that there is something that the rest of the team has not thought about yet.
As a team they could learn how they can work together and include everyone, much the same as in an office.
Neurodiversity should never be frowned upon, and as more people are getting diagnosed so are famous people. Some sportsmen to open up about their diagnosis are swimmer Michael Phelps, and footballer Greg Halford who played for many clubs including Portsmouth in his pro career. Many neurodiverse celebrities have had absolutely glittering careers, as they have persisted on getting everything about their talent right to the last degree.
From April 2nd to April 8th is World Autism Acceptance Week which hopes to raise more attention to just the section that people on the Autism Spectrum face, and try and help it not to be such a stigma in the present age.
We as a community need to do more to protect the talents of these wonderful humans with neurodiverse brains because you never know when you will coach a child to be the next Ronaldo or Messi!