The Executive Function Developmental Arc ADHD Research Has Barely Examined
For decades, ADHD research has documented executive-function differences. We have studied inhibition, working memory, sustained attention, impulsivity, delayed consequences, emotional regulation, academic performance, medication response, and executive dysfunction. We have scanned ADHD brains and compared them with neurotypical brains. We have followed children longitudinally and documented differences in developmental trajectories.
But there is a comparison we have barely made: what happens when an ADHD child spends ten, fifteen, or twenty years becoming an athlete?
I do not mean exercising three times a week as an ADHD intervention. I mean becoming an athlete.
The goalkeeper who begins playing at eight and continues through college spends thousands of hours making decisions while moving. The baseball player repeatedly learns to prepare for the next pitch, recover from the previous one, anticipate another person's actions, inhibit an immediate response, follow a plan, abandon that plan when circumstances change, and regulate emotion while the game continues without waiting for him.
The golfer learns course management with a trusted caddy. The pitcher has a pitching coach. The hitter finds the manager who understands him. The struggling professional athlete finds a sports psychologist who earns his trust.
These athletes are not merely exercising. They are developing inside an ecosystem of movement, engagement, structure, feedback, consequences, relationships, and repetition.
And we have barely investigated what that ecosystem might do to the developmental arc of executive function in ADHD.
We Have Studied ADHD Athletes—But Mostly for What Goes Wrong
There is research on athletes with ADHD, and that distinction matters. The problem is not that researchers have completely ignored ADHD athletes. Much of the existing literature simply asks different questions from the ones being proposed here.
A systematic review of ADHD in athletes, for example, examined issues including neurocognitive performance, concussion risk, symptom reporting, and recovery. Other sports-medicine literature has examined prevalence, medication, treatment, injury, and clinical management.
Those are legitimate questions, but they largely preserve the traditional direction of ADHD research: What is impaired? What additional risks does ADHD create? How should those risks and symptoms be managed?
I am asking something different.
What did the athlete learn?
More specifically, what executive functions did an ADHD athlete learn after spending thousands upon thousands of hours in a highly engaged physical environment containing immediate feedback, meaningful consequences, repeated decision-making, inherent structure, and trusted human beings guiding that development? How does that developmental arc compare with an ADHD child who did not grow up inside that environment?
That is a very different experiment.
Exercise Is Only One Piece
There is already substantial reason to believe physical activity matters. Research examining exercise and ADHD has reported improvements in several areas of executive functioning, including inhibitory control, working memory, and cognitive flexibility. Exercise can also affect arousal, mood, attention, and emotional regulation.
But exercise alone is too small a frame for what happens to an athlete.
Running on a treadmill is exercise. Playing shortstop is something more.
A shortstop has to know the situation before the pitch, anticipate possibilities, maintain positioning, react to a ball traveling at enormous speed after contact, decide where the play is, coordinate with teammates, inhibit the wrong response, execute the correct response, process the result, and immediately prepare for another pitch. Then he does it again and again.
That is exercise embedded inside continuous perception, prediction, decision-making, movement, consequence, correction, and repetition.
Open-skill sports are particularly interesting for precisely this reason. The environment changes continuously. The athlete cannot simply memorize one motor sequence and repeat it because the next action depends upon what just happened. Perception and action remain coupled.
For an ADHD brain, that may matter enormously.
Engagement Changes the Equation
Athletics also gives us something many traditional ADHD experiments cannot reproduce very well: engagement.
Baseball is not merely physical activity to the kid who loves baseball. Golf is not simply moderate exercise to the child who falls in love with golf. Soccer is not an intervention, and hockey is not behavioral therapy. These things become interests, and sometimes they become passions.
Passion changes the attentional environment.
This is where hyperfocus becomes important—not as the entire explanation, but as one mechanism operating inside a much larger developmental system.
My hypothesis is that hyperfocus can extend the ADHD experience of now. One of the recurring difficulties in ADHD is the distance between a present action and a future consequence. Do this assignment now because your grade will matter three months from now. Save money today because you will need it next year. Prepare tonight because something important happens next week.
The consequence exists, but it may not exert enough force in the present moment.
Athletics repeatedly compresses that distance. The athlete acts, something happens, the athlete adjusts, and then tries again. The feedback loop can take seconds rather than weeks.
But highly engaged athletic development also begins stretching that runway. An athlete gradually learns that what happens on Tuesday affects Saturday. Preparation affects performance. Sleep affects recovery. The pitch thrown in the first inning affects how a hitter approaches the pitcher in the sixth. The decision made on the seventh hole can affect what becomes possible on the eighteenth.
The athlete is learning relationships between now and later.
My hypothesis is that when hyperfocus extends engagement sufficiently, cause and consequence can remain connected long enough to become experiential learning. That may be one route through which executive function is learned.
The Human Scaffold
Then we add the variable that is easiest to overlook when we reduce athletics to exercise: people.
Athletes do not develop alone. They have coaches, managers, caddies, teammates, trainers, sports psychologists, and mentors. Sometimes one of those people becomes extraordinarily important.
Every sport is filled with stories about the one coach who finally understood an athlete, the pitching coach who could reach a pitcher when nobody else could, the manager who had a player's back, or the caddy whose golfer trusted him enough to listen when every emotional impulse was screaming for a different shot.
That relationship may be doing far more executive-function work than we recognize.
A trusted caddy can connect now to later. The golfer sees the flag and wants to attack. The caddy sees the golf course. He knows where the miss cannot be, what is coming three holes later, what the golfer tends to do under pressure, and when emotion is beginning to replace strategy.
The golfer does not have to independently maintain every variable because part of the executive load has become external. But something else may eventually happen. The golfer listens, acts on the advice, experiences the result, and repeats that process hundreds or thousands of times.
Eventually, some of what originally existed between golfer and caddy may begin to exist within the golfer.
The scaffold may not merely compensate for missing executive function.
Under the right conditions, it may help teach it.
We Have Seen This Pattern Before
As discussed elsewhere in this book, athletics did not invent this developmental pattern. We have already seen versions of it in very different environments.
Neil deGrasse Tyson has described parents—and particularly a mother—who kept exposing their children to possibilities around New York until their individual interests began to emerge. His mother did not need to understand astrophysics at his level to understand that astrophysics mattered profoundly to her son. She helped provide opportunity while allowing the interest to belong to him.
Steve Jobs had fourth-grade teacher Imogene “Teddy” Hill, the teacher he later credited with reaching him when school largely had not. Jobs also grew up learning through making. Grinding a lens and building a camera were not abstract executive-function lessons. The physical task required sequencing, persistence, attention, correction, frustration tolerance, and completion. He was learning executive functions while knowing that he was learning how to accomplish something real.
Athletics gives us equally striking versions of the pattern. Roy Halladay had sports psychologist Harvey Dorf during the reconstruction of his pitching career. Dorf's contribution was not another pitch. It involved the mental architecture surrounding pitching: preparation, routines, attention, emotional control, recovery, and the ability to return to the next task.
Pádraig Harrington provides another version. Bob Rotella worked with Harrington on the mental architecture of competitive golf: commitment, attention, confidence, acceptance, and staying with a plan under pressure. Harrington also had longtime caddy Ronan Flood inside the competitive environment itself. One relationship could help build the mental framework; another could help maintain strategy while the consequences were unfolding in real time.
Different people. Different environments. Different forms of scaffolding.
But the developmental question is remarkably similar: what happens when a deeply engaged person encounters the right human scaffold at the right time and then spends years practicing what that relationship is helping them learn?
That is the pattern I want ADHD research to investigate.
Executive Functions Disguised as Baseball
Nobody tells a fourteen-year-old pitcher that today they are going to work on prospective memory, inhibitory control, emotional regulation, planning, cognitive flexibility, delayed gratification, and task sequencing.
They tell him they are going to teach him how to pitch.
That means preparing between starts, studying hitters, following a game plan, resetting after somebody crushes a fastball, remembering what a hitter did two innings ago, taking care of his arm, and doing today's work even though he isn't pitching until Friday. It means understanding why one pitch is being thrown now because of what the pitcher wants to make possible later.
Those are executive functions, but the athlete experiences them as baseball.
That distinction may be enormously important for ADHD. Executive functions are being taught inside an activity the athlete already cares about, while the athlete is engaged, while feedback is rapid, while consequences are meaningful, and while a trusted person may be helping connect actions across time.
The athlete may be learning executive function without ever knowing that executive function is what is being learned.
The Advocate Changes the Meaning of the Lesson
This is where Dr. William Dodson's work on empathy, rejection sensitivity, and the importance of an Advocate becomes particularly relevant.
In personal correspondence with me about RSD and empathy, Dodson described the importance of the person who continues to recognize the value and potential of the ADHD child even when things are going badly. That Advocate can be a parent or grandparent, but it can also be a teacher or coach.
The examples we have already encountered should make the larger pattern visible. The Advocate does not have to perform the activity for the learner. Tyson's mother did not have to become an astrophysicist. Miss Hill did not build Steve Jobs's future products. Harvey Dorf did not throw Roy Halladay's pitches, and Bob Rotella did not hit Pádraig Harrington's golf shots.
The Advocate helps create the conditions under which the learner can do increasingly difficult things.
That matters enormously in athletics because passion and relationship can operate simultaneously. If baseball is already a passion and the coach is trusted, the athlete cares what that person thinks. He knows the coach has his back, and he does not want to disappoint him.
Dodson captured the emotional power of that relationship this way:
“A child’s worst fears are that they are unlovable (because they are broken in some way) and they are going to be abandoned with a problem they cannot fix, no matter how hard they try. If a child knows that you see the potential for greatness in them, they will walk through Hell for you to deliver that greatness.”
A manager can tell an athlete, “I need you to work on this for six weeks.” Six weeks may be neurologically distant, but the desire not to disappoint someone who believes in you exists now. The relationship has given a future consequence a present emotional anchor.
This creates another testable possibility: a trusted coach or mentor may help bridge temporal gaps that the ADHD athlete has difficulty bridging independently. After enough repetitions, some of those bridges may remain after the coach stops building them.
The Chef With the Perfect Kitchen and the Disaster at Home
There is a problem, however. Learning an executive function in one environment does not necessarily mean it becomes universally available.
I have seen this repeatedly with ADHD children. They can become extraordinarily organized in one domain while appearing incapable of organization somewhere else.
Consider a chef. At work, everything has a place. Knives are maintained, ingredients are prepped, the station is organized, timing matters, cleanliness matters, and tasks have sequences. The chef can simultaneously manage multiple dishes, changing temperatures, other employees, incoming tickets, and ingredients at different stages of preparation.
Then the chef goes home and there are dishes in the sink, laundry on the floor, and mail piled on the counter.
If executive function were simply a fixed internal capacity that a person either possesses or lacks, this becomes difficult to explain. But what if executive function is substantially experiential? What if some executive functions are learned within particular environments because those environments provide the engagement, feedback, structure, movement, consequences, and scaffolding necessary for that learning?
Then the contradiction begins to make sense.
The chef learned how to organize a kitchen. The athlete learned how to organize athletic performance. That does not necessarily mean either person learned how to organize everything.
Compartmentalization May Be the Missing Piece
This may be one of the most important questions the proposed research could answer: how much executive-function learning transfers?
An elite athlete may develop extraordinary emotional regulation during competition while struggling with emotional regulation elsewhere. A pitcher may execute a five-day preparation schedule with extraordinary precision but forget to pay an electric bill. A golfer may make sophisticated decisions involving probabilities and future consequences over eighteen holes while struggling to plan the following week.
That does not mean the executive function is fake. It may mean it is compartmentalized.
If that is true, ADHD research may be making a serious measurement error when it assumes that executive function observed in one context adequately describes executive capacity everywhere else. The better questions become: Where has this person learned executive function? Under what conditions can they access it? What allows an executive function learned in one environment to transfer into another?
Those questions may tell us considerably more than simply asking whether someone possesses executive function.
We Need the Four-Way Comparison
This is why simply comparing ADHD athletes with neurotypical people is not enough.
The study needs four groups: ADHD athletes, ADHD non-athletes, neurotypical athletes, and neurotypical non-athletes. Ideally, researchers would begin following them before their developmental pathways have fully diverged and continue through middle school, high school, college, and into adulthood.
Researchers could repeatedly measure executive function, emotional regulation, planning, inhibition, prospective memory, working memory, and delayed-consequence processing. Crucially, those abilities should be measured both inside the athlete's sport and outside it.
Exercise volume matters, but it cannot be the only environmental variable measured. Researchers would also need to measure engagement, passion, flow and hyperfocus, coaching stability, mentor trust, duration and quality of mentorship, inherent structure, and the frequency and immediacy of feedback.
Structural MRI, diffusion imaging, and functional imaging where appropriate could then be layered onto the behavioral measurements. Instead of taking one neurological photograph at the end, researchers could watch the developmental trajectories unfold.
The central question is straightforward:
Does sustained athletic development interact with ADHD differently than it interacts with neurotypical development?
That is the experiment.
What If Their Brains Are Different?
Perhaps ADHD athletes who have spent fifteen years inside these environments will show measurable differences in white-matter organization, functional connectivity, cortical development, or other neural measures compared with ADHD non-athletes.
Perhaps they will not. Either result matters.
If measurable neurological differences emerge alongside different executive-function trajectories, then developmental experience may be interacting with ADHD neurodevelopment in ways our traditional comparison groups have failed to isolate. If the scans show only modest differences while behavioral differences are enormous, that matters too. Highly engaged environments and human scaffolding may substantially alter functional outcomes without producing the kinds of structural differences our current imaging methods readily detect.
That is what makes this a scientific hypothesis rather than a declaration of what the scans are required to show.
Stop Asking Only What ADHD Cannot Do
There is a larger problem underneath all of this.
For decades, we have selected environments in which ADHD struggles and then used performance in those environments to describe ADHD. We ask people to sit, listen, wait, organize an abstract task, work toward a consequence months away, remain still, generate their own motivation, maintain their own structure, and remember what they will need later.
Then we document the deficit.
Athletics gives us an opportunity to turn the telescope around. Find the ADHD person who has spent twenty years successfully doing something extraordinarily difficult and ask what that person learned. Ask how it was learned, what the environment supplied, what exercise contributed, what engagement and hyperfocus contributed, what rapid feedback contributed, and what the trusted coach contributed.
Then ask what thousands of repetitions did and what eventually became part of the person.
That is the ADHD athletic conundrum.
We may have spent decades studying executive-function deficits while barely examining one of the largest natural laboratories available for understanding how people with ADHD might actually learn executive function.
The athletes have been there the entire time.
We just haven't been asking them the right questions.
Epistemic Status & Testable Predictions
The central argument of this article is a hypothesis, not an established conclusion. Research already supports several pieces surrounding it. ADHD is associated with differences in executive functioning and neurodevelopmental trajectories. Physical activity can affect cognition and executive functioning, while athletic participation places sustained demands on perception, inhibition, working memory, rapid decision-making, adaptation, emotional regulation, and motor control.
What has not been adequately established is how these factors interact across ADHD development. The point of stating the predictions explicitly is simple: these are not rhetorical claims placed beyond examination. They are proposed mechanisms with observable consequences.
Test them.
Testable Prediction 1: ADHD Athletes Will Show a Different Executive-Function Developmental Arc
Long-term ADHD athletes should demonstrate a different executive-function developmental trajectory from matched ADHD non-athletes, and any observed difference should not automatically be attributed to exercise.
Researchers should follow ADHD athletes, ADHD non-athletes, neurotypical athletes, and neurotypical non-athletes longitudinally while repeatedly measuring planning, inhibition, working memory, prospective memory, emotional regulation, cognitive flexibility, and delayed-consequence processing. The important measurement is not merely where each group finishes, but whether their developmental slopes differ.
If they do not, this prediction fails.
Testable Prediction 2: Engagement Will Predict More Than Exercise Volume Alone
Two ADHD children can perform comparable amounts of physical activity while experiencing those activities very differently. One may be exercising because an adult requires it; the other may be consumed by baseball, soccer, hockey, golf, swimming, gymnastics, or another sport.
If this hypothesis is correct, intensity of engagement, interest, passion, flow, and hyperfocus should explain some developmental differences that exercise volume alone cannot explain. Match physical activity while independently measuring engagement and see whether engagement contributes additional predictive power.
Testable Prediction 3: Hyperfocus Will Extend the Cause-and-Effect Runway
Highly engaged ADHD athletes should become increasingly capable of connecting present actions with more distant consequences inside their athletic domain. Early learning may involve extremely short feedback loops in which an action produces a result and an immediate adjustment. With development, those loops should stretch.
Today's practice affects Saturday's performance. Recovery tonight affects tomorrow. A pitch thrown in the first inning changes what becomes possible in the sixth. Course management on the seventh hole affects decisions on the eighteenth.
If hyperfocus helps extend the experiential now, researchers should be able to measure that extension rather than merely observing improved performance during periods of intense engagement.
Testable Prediction 4: Trusted Mentorship Will Predict Executive-Function Development
ADHD athletes with stable, trusted coaches, caddies, managers, sports psychologists, or mentors should demonstrate stronger development of domain-specific executive functions than otherwise comparable ADHD athletes without those relationships.
Researchers cannot measure this by checking a box marked “had a coach.” They need to measure duration, trust, perceived advocacy, and whether the athlete believes this person understands them, believes in them, and has their back.
If the Advocate matters, those relational variables should predict something.
Testable Prediction 5: Trust Will Change the Effect of Instruction
Technical expertise and relational trust should not automatically be treated as the same variable. Comparable strategic or executive guidance can be delivered under different relational conditions, allowing researchers to examine whether instruction from a deeply trusted coach produces greater attention, retention, persistence, behavioral change, and eventual independent execution.
If identical information produces different learning depending upon the relationship through which it is delivered, then the human relationship is not noise surrounding the intervention.
It is part of the intervention.
Testable Prediction 6: Human Scaffolding Can Become Learned Executive Function
A caddy may initially perform part of the golfer's executive work externally by remembering the larger strategy, identifying risk, interrupting impulsive decisions, connecting the current shot with later holes, and helping regulate decisions under emotional pressure.
Over repeated experiences, the athlete should begin independently performing some functions that previously required the scaffold. Researchers could measure what a mentor initially supplies and then track whether the athlete begins anticipating, sequencing, regulating, and planning without prompting.
The same experiment can be performed with pitchers and pitching coaches, hitters and managers, athletes and sports psychologists. If the scaffold only compensates and never contributes to learning, that prediction should fail.
Testable Prediction 7: Athletic Executive Function Will Be Partially Compartmentalized
The hypothesis does not predict that an athlete who develops exceptional executive functioning within a sport will suddenly become exceptionally organized everywhere. It predicts imperfect transfer.
An ADHD pitcher may execute a five-day preparation schedule precisely while forgetting an electric bill. A golfer may demonstrate sophisticated inhibition and long-range strategic planning on a golf course while struggling to organize the following week.
Researchers therefore need to measure executive function both inside and outside the athlete's highly developed domain. A large discrepancy between the two should not automatically be discarded as measurement noise.
The discrepancy may be the finding.
Testable Prediction 8: Transfer Can Be Deliberately Taught
If executive functions are partially learned and partially context-bound, researchers should be able to test whether deliberate mapping increases transfer.
A pitcher already knows how to prepare for a start five days from now. Can that preparation architecture be explicitly mapped onto an exam next Friday? An athlete already knows how to reset after a catastrophic mistake during competition. Can that same recovery sequence be deliberately identified and transferred to a mistake during a mathematics test?
If explicit mapping improves transfer, education does not have to create executive function from scratch. Sometimes the better starting question may be: Where does this child already know how to do this?
Testable Prediction 9: Open-Skill Sports Will Produce Different Effects From Repetitive Exercise
Not all physical activity places the same cognitive demands on the brain. Running on a treadmill and playing shortstop can both produce cardiovascular exercise, but shortstop continuously requires perception, anticipation, inhibition, spatial processing, rapid decision-making, adjustment, and coordination with other people.
If these sensorimotor decision loops contribute independently to executive-function development, long-term participation in open-skill sports should produce different patterns from comparable amounts of repetitive closed-skill exercise.
Match exercise intensity and duration while varying cognitive and environmental complexity. The differences, if they exist, should become visible.
Testable Prediction 10: ADHD Athletic Development May Produce a Detectable Neural Trajectory
Follow ADHD athletes, ADHD non-athletes, neurotypical athletes, and neurotypical non-athletes longitudinally while combining behavioral measurement with structural MRI, diffusion imaging, and functional imaging where appropriate.
If sustained athletic development interacts with ADHD neurodevelopment, differences may emerge in white-matter organization, cortical development, functional connectivity, neural efficiency, or other measurable features. If behavioral trajectories diverge dramatically while conventional imaging measures do not, that result is also important because it would constrain the biological explanation.
The hypothesis does not get to dictate what the MRI must show. The experiment gets to tell us.
Testable Prediction 11: Exercise, Engagement, Structure, and Mentorship Will Not Be Interchangeable
This may ultimately be the most important experiment because “participates in sports” collapses too many variables into one box.
Researchers need to separate exercise volume from engagement, hyperfocus, environmental structure, feedback frequency, sensorimotor complexity, emotional regulation, mentor stability, relationship quality, and trust. Then they need to examine the interactions among them.
The hypothesis is not that one magical ingredient called sports fixes ADHD. It is that a particular developmental ecosystem may allow an ADHD brain to learn executive functions differently.
That claim is measurable. It is falsifiable.
So test the damn thing.
References
Barkley, R. A. (1997). Behavioral inhibition, sustained attention, and executive functions: Constructing a unifying theory of ADHD. Psychological Bulletin, 121(1), 65–94.
Barkley, R. A. (2012). Executive Functions: What They Are, How They Work, and Why They Evolved. Guilford Press.
Dodson, W. W. (2021). Personal correspondence with Joseph Sisko regarding RSD, empathy, successful ADHD development, and the role of the Advocate. August 2021.
Han, D. H., McDuff, D., Thompson, D., Hitchcock, M. E., Reardon, C. L., & Hainline, B. (2019). Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder in elite athletes: A narrative review. British Journal of Sports Medicine, 53, 741–745.
Hawkins, J. (2021). A Thousand Brains: A New Theory of Intelligence. Basic Books.
Poysophon, P., & Rao, A. L. (2018). Neurocognitive deficits associated with ADHD in athletes: A systematic review. Sports Health, 10(4), 317–326.
Twenge, J. M., & Campbell, W. K. (2018). Associations between screen time and lower psychological well-being among children and adolescents: Evidence from a population-based study. Preventive Medicine Reports, 12, 271–283.
Additional research relevant to this hypothesis includes longitudinal neuroimaging studies of ADHD development; systematic reviews and meta-analyses examining acute and chronic exercise and executive functioning in ADHD; research comparing open-skill and closed-skill exercise; studies of executive-function development in competitive athletes; and sports-neuroscience research examining neural efficiency, motor learning, cognitive control, and long-term athletic training.
These research traditions provide pieces of the puzzle. What remains inadequately studied is their intersection: the long-term executive-function developmental arc of the highly engaged ADHD athlete, and the roles that exercise, passion, hyperfocus, environmental structure, immediate feedback, mentorship, trust, and repeated experiential learning may play in shaping it.