Why This Project Exists

I learned most of what I know about power from sports.

Not from books about it. From playing it. From the way a rotation resets authority every six points in volleyball. From the moment a quarterback realizes the running route is off and still has to make a play. From watching coaches make decisions with incomplete information while five thousand people wait to see if they were right.

Sport is pedagogy. This is not a metaphor.

Professional sport teaches bodies how much pain is acceptable, whose exhaustion gets called dedication and whose gets called weak, what kinds of authority feel natural, when care is strategic and when it’s excessive. These lessons are not abstract. They are produced through repetition, pressure, and consequence. They are learned publicly. And they shape what feels possible far beyond the game.

Professional sport teaches bodies how much pain is acceptable, whose exhaustion gets called dedication and whose gets called weak, what kinds of authority feel natural, when care is strategic and when it’s excessive. These lessons are not abstract. They are produced through repetition, pressure, and consequence. They are learned publicly. And they shape what feels possible far beyond the game.

Most writing about sport operates in two modes: optimization or inspiration. Either we get better metrics, better data, better performance protocols—or we get motivational language that erases the conditions under which bodies actually labor. Both approaches leave extractive systems untouched. Both avoid asking what sport teaches and who benefits from those lessons.

The Queer Art of Coaching refuses that binary.

This project begins with coaching because coaching is where sport’s contradictions are most exposed. Coaches stand on the sideline—close enough to feel the game, far enough to see its patterns. Their authority is always partial. They cannot execute, only prepare. They make decisions under constraint, often working with bodies already carrying injury, fatigue, or histories that metrics cannot measure.

This is coaching as improvisation. As attunement. As pedagogy that happens in real time, under pressure, with stakes that matter.

In extractive systems, coaching becomes a technology for taking more: more effort, more sacrifice, more endurance—until something breaks. Burnout becomes personal failure. Injury becomes collateral. Care only arrives after value has been extracted.

Professional sport is a racialized labor regime. The NBA, WNBA, the NFL—these are not neutral spaces. They are institutions organized around the extraction of primarily Black and brown athletic labor and/or enforcing narrow scripts of masculinity, femininity, discipline, and disposability. Coaching operates within this regime, either smoothing over its violence or making it visible.

This project asks different questions:

• What if coaching were understood as pedagogy rather than control?

• What if limitation were treated as knowledge, not weakness?

• What if leadership were measured by sustainability, not intensity?

• What if we took seriously that sport teaches, and asked what those lessons produce—in bodies, in culture, in our understanding of who is valuable and who is disposable?

Queerness in this project is method, not metaphor. It is a way of reading power that refuses to mistake domination for excellence, that values collaboration over command, that understands care as strategic rather than sentimental. Queerness, drawn from queer of color critique and Black feminist legacies, is about resisting normative arrangements of authority, time, and value—especially within institutions organized around violence and extraction.

I write from the overlap of professional volleyball and basketball, critical theory, and years spent on the sideline watching how sport forms bodies and disciplines labor. This project draws on:

• Queer of color critique (Ferguson, Muñoz, Rodríguez)

• Black feminist thought (Lorde, Spillers, Hartman, Nash)

• Borderlands epistemology (Anzaldúa, Moraga)

• Disability justice (Mingus, Piepzna-Samarasinha)

• Critical studies of labor, race, and the body

The work happens at intersections. I am interested in what becomes visible when you stand at the edge of professional sport—on the sideline, in the space between play and analysis—and refuse to look away from what it produces.

This Substack does not promise perfect answers. It offers a way of reading the game differently—and asks what becomes possible when we treat professional sport as a serious object of study rather than entertainment or inspiration.

The lessons sometimes travel to other domains. I have coached outside of sport and recognized the same patterns. But professional sport remains the center of this work—the place where these dynamics are most visible, most urgent, and most in need of critical attention.

Because if you have ever played, coached, or watched professional sport closely—if you have felt the way it teaches without naming what it is teaching—you already know this work matters.

The question is: what are we willing to see?