On a gray January afternoon, people of all ages and abilities scale the craggy walls at Movement, a rock climbing gym in Rockville. Tucked in a corner of the 38,000-square-foot facility, Irina Vlasova, rock climbing coach and front desk supervisor, encourages two third grade boys to come off the wall and go over the plan for the day, which she has written on a handheld whiteboard.
One boy comes over to sit and listen. The other, Micah, is my child. Watching with the outsize energy of a parent prepared for any event to go awry, I see he ignores the request. Irina tries again, asking Micah to correct any of her spelling mistakes, a running joke between the two of them. He considers this.
“Off the wall,” she calls again as he traverses the lower level of the climbing wall in one of the areas that is safe to climb without a harness and attached rope. “You need to know the plan.” She shows him a list of the drills they will do. Micah responds that drills will be a waste of his time.
“Do you want to be a better climber?” she asks him.
Micah appears to listen. He claims again that it will be a waste of time, but comes off the wall to sit with her. After a brief conversation, his harness is hooked into a carabiner and he starts climbing another section of the wall—stopping halfway to complain about the posted level of difficulty but continuing to move up steadily while Irina holds the rope below.
Rock climbing is the latest sport that Micah has tried, and the one that has lasted the longest, primarily due to Irina’s patience and willingness to work with him. Micah has a slew of eccentricities that put him squarely in the neurodivergent camp. Neurodiversity is a set of terms used nonmedically to reflect the idea that learning and processing differences, including ADHD and autism, aren’t seen as deficits, according to a blog post by Harvard Health Publishing. As his parents, we’d given up—after many failed attempts—on team sports, where the unpredictable behavior of other children made it far too difficult for Micah to modulate his reactions.
But then, in third grade, Micah made a close friend at school, giving us another family to collaborate with in finding a physical activity the boys could do together. They’d heard of Movement, and after a few calls and emails we were connected to Irina.
Most weekends, the two boys share a one-hour private lesson with Irina, 39, who has been at Movement for more than two years. Micah is one of four neurodivergent climbers she works with on a regular basis. All of the climbing instructors and coaches at Movement are trained to work with neurodiverse kids, and Irina has additional training by Kennedy Krieger Institute in Baltimore and is a parent of a neurodiverse child herself.
Climbing is particularly helpful for neurodiverse kids, she explains, because it helps them increase their understanding of where their body is in space, which is something that doesn’t always come easily. “Climbing requires a lot of unusual moves that we don’t usually do when walking or running orexercising on the ground: constant change of our center of gravity, weight shifting and balancing, while pulling and pushing. You need to be very in control of your body to be able to deal with gravity,” she says. “And it trains your brain to develop this body awareness better.”
When Micah yells down that the climb is too hard, the posted difficulty level is inaccurate, or that he needs the rope untangled, Irina uses a good-natured response to redirect him to the climb. When he moves past a particularly hard turn on the overhang—a part of the wall that juts out so the climber is at an angle—she shouts, “You got it, Micah!” He perseveres and touches the finish hold to signal he’s reached the end of the climb, then yells, “Ready to lower,” so Irina can allow slack in the rope to help him come down.
“How was it?” I ask him.
“Tiring.”
“Did you have fun?”
He sighs. “Sort of.” But within a few minutes he is ready to go again, and soon he is up and cheering on his friend, who is taking his turn to climb.
I’ll take that as a yes.
Physical activity is something most parents want for their kids: It can help with emotional regulation, academic performance, and reducing anxiety. But for neurodiverse kids, who often have difficulty with sensory processing, social interaction, executive functioning and transitions, group activities like traditional sports teams present one-too-many challenges.
A child like Micah, whose level of cooperation can fluctuate widely, needs the Irinas of the world—people who possess the deep well of patience and understanding required for complicated kids to achieve success.
For Natalie Liniak of Gaithersburg, a lack of sports options for her neurodiverse kid pushed her and her husband, Tom, to create Sports Plus, a nonprofit that provides instructional fitness programs to learners with developmental disabilities. Back when her oldest son, Jon, was diagnosed with autism 26 years ago, “No one really knew what autism was,” she says.
Natalie and Tom felt they needed to be part of the solution. In 2004, they began meeting up with six to seven other families with neurodiverse kids at an “empty, raggy field” to play soccer and later added track and field. Within a year, there was such an outpouring of interest that they created Sports Plus.
“It was overwhelming—we couldn’t serve everybody,” Natalie says. “We were still trying to figure out what to do, how to structure these classes, so that the kids who come to the program are supported properly. We really wanted to put on something that was special and customized for them.” They began to focus on fitness and running programs, keeping a 1-to-4 instructor to student ratio to provide enough support for the kids. They also began creating social programs for neurodivergent young adults and teens—meeting up for activities that included rock climbing, bowling and mini-golf.
Swimming has been another focus area. When Jon was 5, Natalie took him to a local swim class—at a location she declines to name—and was horrified when the instructor dunked him underwater. “She said, ‘This is how we teach all of our special needs kids.’ My son was so traumatized by this it took three years for us to fix that,” Natalie says.
In 2007, Sports Plus began offering swim lessons for a “range of kids on the spectrum,” as Tom describes it. Some communicate clearly and would be considered to have high-functioning autism, while others are nonverbal. The swim program aims to meet kids where they are. Lessons take place on Saturdays at the Bender Jewish Community Center of Greater Washington in Rockville and Lakewood Country Club in Rockville. The programs are open to anyone with a developmental disability, and the costs are subsidized through grants and donations, with parents paying about $60 per lesson. “We’ll take any space we can get,” Tom says. “It’s really hard to find pool space in Montgomery County.”
On a Saturday in February, Alex Plante, accompanied by his father, Jean-Frederic, showed up for Alex’s half-hour swim lesson at the Bender JCC. Alex, 14, gleefully kicked off his sandals and entered the water easily, holding on to a floating barbell to help him swim laps across the pool. Alex has been taking lessons here for two years—it was the only swim option Jean-Frederic could find for his son when they moved to Rockville from San Diego in 2021.
Alex initially refused to get into the water, but persistent, gentle coaching began to change that. “I really thought it was a high bar for [Alex] to be able to swim,” Jean-Frederic says.
Tom and Natalie have what he describes as a “blind confidence” for what Alex and the other kids in the program can achieve, similar to the confidence that Irina has in Micah’s abilities. “This blind confidence is both contagious and frankly refreshing,” says Jean-Frederic, and I can attest to this.
Alex is still reluctant to put his head in the water, but he can swim on his own. Last summer, Jean-Frederic was surprised to discover at the pool that Alex was actually having fun swimming. “Two years ago we couldn’t get anywhere close to this,” he says.
That same day at the JCC, 9-year-old Ahmed Agha enthusiastically jumped into the water for his lesson. He had refused to get in for the first two months, having such a high level of anxiety that he would cling to the instructor and be unwilling to let go. But the gentle persistence of the Sports Plus instructors paid off, and Ahmed was smiling and splashing in the water with his arms before grabbing the barbell and listening to the instructors for his lesson.
“These swimming lessons are the most essential thing in my kid’s overall upbringing,” says Agha Saadat, Ahmed’s father. “These kids don’t know the depth of the water, they don’t know the danger of the water, they don’t know what can go wrong in two or three minutes.”
Ahmed’s parents, who live in Bethesda, have been happy with the services Ahmed gets through Montgomery County Public Schools, but his father believes swimming should be a part of that. He is beginning to lobby the Montgomery County Board of Education to include some swim instruction in its autism services. “The school has already invested a lot in his skills, but this,” he says, pointing to the kids in the water, “should be included.”
Saadat’s concerns are substantiated. For children with autism, the risk of drowning is 160 times greater than for the general pediatric population, according to a 2017 study from Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health. In the summer of 2024, after two local children drowned, there was increased demand for swim lessons, Natalie says.
The lifesaving skills of swimming are crucial, but there is also a confidence boost that Natalie and Tom see in the kids who have been coming to the pool, pointing out more than one kid who has made tremendous progress—the child who cried and now puts his face in the water, the one who refused to dunk his head and can now swim laps. They’ve even started a mini-swim team at Lakewood Country Club—and some of their swimmers have gone on to do summer swim teams or even high school swim.
Tom recounts his son Jon’s experience with the summer swim team at Lakelands swim club. “To them he was just another kid. He wasn’t Jon with autism, he was just Jon the swimmer, part of the team. This is the feeling we want to give to everyone.”
Beyond securing pool space,another constant challenge Tom and Natalie face is keeping a full roster of instructors who have the blend of qualifications and energy to work with a neurodiverse population. “Our kids can judge belief,” Tom says. “They can spot right away who believes in them and who doesn’t.” The instructors are paid positions—many work in public health, medicine or special education—and they are paired with competitive high school swimmers who are there as volunteers.
After observing a swim class, I talked to Micah about the option of restarting swim lessons. He has some swim skills, but they could use a refresh. Up until now, the bulk of his swim lessons have been with well-intentioned teenagers at the North Chevy Chase swimming pool. “These new teachers,” I tell him, “will be like Irina. They will understand you. They will get you. They will want to work with you.”
Maybe Tom is right. Maybe Micah has the innate ability to suss out who will believe in him and who might consider him difficult. Who are the instructors who will want to champion his success, even if it looks different than what they are used to? And isn’t that what we all want for our kids?
Micah is wary. He doesn’t agree right away and certainly lacks the enthusiasm that Alex and Ahmed have for their lessons, but that took time and persistence.
Finally, he tells me “maybe.”
I’ll take that as a place to start.
Rebecca Gale is a writer with the Better Life Lab at New America, where she covers child care. She lives in Chevy Chase with her husband and three kids, and writes a newsletter on Substack, It Doesn’t Have to Be This Hard.
This appears in the May/June 2025 issue of Bethesda Magazine.
