What Coaches and Mentors Can Learn from The Dyslexic Advantage
Coach Reyes had one player, Malik, who could read an entire defensive formation at a glance and call an adjustment before the other team finished setting up, but who visibly tensed every time the team had to review a printed playbook together. Malik always volunteered to demonstrate a play physically rather than explain it from the page, and his teammates followed his lead without question on the field. Off the field, though, a school counselor had flagged him as a weak student who "didn't apply himself" to written work, a label that seemed to shrink him every time it came up. Reyes had spent years developing athletes' physical skills without ever really asking why a kid this sharp in real time went quiet around a page of text, and it started to seem like a question worth actually asking.
The whole book, compressed
This edition works through 4 core lessons — take them one at a time, not all at once.
What's different for your conditions
Tap whichever ones sound like you. Nothing here is sent or saved — it's just for your own noticing.
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The core lessons, applied to you
Recognizing when struggle is not the full story
A mentee who has been labeled a weak student may be carrying a specific, distinct processing difficulty around reading or language, one that coexists with real strengths a coach can see clearly in the mentee's actual performance. This is not true of every struggling student a coach meets, and it is not a coach's role to diagnose, but noticing the pattern is worth naming carefully and without overreach.
A coach naming a possible pattern casually, without real evidence or a proper evaluation, risks handing a young person an unearned label instead of real help.
If you notice this pattern, encourage a proper evaluation through a school or professional rather than offering your own diagnosis.
Strengths that show up first in performance
Coaches often see, before anyone else does, a mentee's strength in reading a live, changing situation and reacting instantly, in physical and spatial reasoning, in learning fastest through demonstration and story rather than instruction sheets, or in noticing patterns across plays, positions, or projects that others miss.
Praising performance strengths without ever connecting them to a mentee's academic struggle can leave the two worlds feeling permanently separate.
Explicitly tell a mentee when a skill you see on the field or in the shop resembles a kind of thinking that matters in school too.
Bridging a performance world and a classroom world
Most schools still measure progress through reading and writing, even for students whose strongest thinking shows up in physical, visual, or real-time settings.
A coach overstepping into academic advocacy without coordinating with parents or teachers can create confusion about who is actually responsible for what.
When appropriate, offer to speak with a teacher or parent about a specific strength you have observed, framed as one data point among others.
Helping someone build an honest self-story
A mentee who has heard "not academic" for years can start to believe it describes their whole self, not just one part of school. Coaches who reflect back a fuller, more accurate picture, one that includes a real difficulty and a real strength side by side, give a young person language for their own capability that can outlast any single season or grade.
The instinct to build a mentee's confidence through their obvious performance strengths can compete with the discomfort of raising a possible reading difficulty that needs outside evaluation. Holding both means praising real strength honestly while still gently pointing toward proper support, rather than avoiding the harder conversation to protect a good relationship.
Name one thing, honestly
- Which mentee's real-time strengths have never been named as thinking skills? - Have you ever noticed a pattern worth mentioning to a parent or teacher but held back? - How do you currently separate praising performance from addressing self-image?
Good. Now look back at the "Try this" line under whichever lesson feels most connected to what you just wrote, and treat that as this week's actual assignment — not all 4 at once.
The practices from this edition
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Run this for seven days
When appropriate, offer to speak with a teacher or parent about a specific strength you have observed, framed as one data point among others.