How_volleyball_proves_AI_cannot_coach_humans.

A Thought About AI, Education and the Future of Sport I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how rapidly AI is changing the world — and whether we, particularly those of us working with youth, are prepared for what is coming. I see AI as both an incredible opportunity and a potential danger. As an educator, one of my passions has always been trying to anticipate the trends that will impact young people. When I was involved in developing a cyber school, I watched the internet and cell phones in the mid-1990s begin to usher in what became the Information Age. Information was suddenly everywhere. Yet rather than fundamentally changing education, much of the response was to restrict the technology. The traditional model remained largely intact. In many ways, an educator from 35 years ago could walk into a classroom or lecture hall today and use essentially the same teaching approach. I worry that sport could make the same mistake with AI. We are entering an era where AI will fundamentally change coaching, training and athlete development. The tools available to athletes and coaches over the next few years will be incredibly powerful. Those who learn how to use them effectively will have an advantage over those who resist them. The question isn't whether AI will change coaching. **It will.** The question is whether we will embrace that change thoughtfully and figure out how AI can make coaching and athlete development better — or whether we will try to resist it and eventually find ourselves trying to catch up. For me, this isn't about replacing coaches with AI. Quite the opposite. I believe the future should be about using AI to allow coaches to spend **more time doing the things humans do best** — mentoring, motivating, challenging, connecting and developing the whole athlete — while AI helps with information, feedback, personalization and the countless other tasks that consume a coach's time. Sport has always taught young people things that are difficult to learn anywhere else: discipline, resilience, patience, failure, teamwork and the value of sustained effort. Those things cannot be replaced by technology. But perhaps technology can help us create a **new coaching pedagogy for a new generation**. That is the challenge I’m interested in exploring. Not how we can use AI to replace what we have always done… **but how we can use AI to rethink what athlete development could become.**