From ABCs to Xs and Os: Georgia Southern education professor seeks to put human connection at the center of classrooms and sports
When the Midwestern State University Mustangs hoisted the 2025 NCAA Division II soccer national championship trophy, they had an unlikely fan rooting for them. Timothy Hinchman, Ed.D., is an assistant professor of elementary and special education at Georgia Southern University’s College of Education, but his work goes beyond preparing future elementary school teachers to teach science. He worked with an interdisciplinary team to overhaul the Mustangs’ training and coaching system by applying his knowledge of instructional techniques to the soccer field.
His work began as a study on how practices were structured, but turned into a mission to answer the question “why would athletes want to play on my team?”
“I conduct research on topics I find interesting, and sports is something I have been involved with for years in my own life,” said Hinchman. “I try to challenge myself to do things that are different. I just think ‘education is about people,’ so I focus on how people learn in many different avenues.”
Hinchman coached basketball and soccer teams during his days as a grade school teacher, winning district championships for the trophy shelves in Alachua County, Florida schools. He saw firsthand how much coaching style matters to a modern sports team.
“I learned it was all about relationships,” said Hinchman. “I found that the same skills I had for classroom management worked as a coach, and we won the middle school championship. I thought I was done after that, but the students went to high school and convinced them to hire me so they could spend their next four years working with me again.”
After a few years teaching in Florida, Hinchman became an assistant professor at Midwestern State. He quickly found a way to apply his educational research to new areas by working with the Mustangs soccer team. Hinchman wanted to test the concept of constraint-based learning with the team. The principle of constraint learning is that students are more creative and think more critically when they are given limits to how they can solve problems. The coach agreed to let Hinchman change the soccer team’s practice sessions to introduce constraints, such as only allowing players to use their left foot to shoot the ball. Hinchman then helped the coaching staff analyze how each player adjusted to the new limits and adapted follow-up drills to help the players develop skills to overcome them.
“We ran the modified practice regimen and published a few papers on it over the course of about three years,” said Hinchman. “That’s when the coaches said, ‘We’ve been doing all this work on our practice, but what about the game?’ That’s when we moved into a new direction looking at communication.”
The coaching staff wanted to solve the growing problem of connecting with their newest recruits. Hinchman put his relational skills to use by working with his research team to survey the Mustang players and analyze their responses to different coaching styles He found that today’s students have the same expectation on the soccer pitch as they do in the classroom: they want to feel cared for and guided to a common goal rather than directed to perform tasks without knowing the purpose. He also found that recent rule changes that allow athletes to transfer to other institutions more easily put extra pressure on coaches to keep players satisfied.
“The way that they were coaching was very traditional and coach-centric, ‘I’m going to tell you what to do, you go and you do it.’” said Hinchman, “Unfortunately, younger players don’t respond well to that. The transfer portal has changed everything. If a player doesn’t feel like they’re being listened to or acknowledged, they’ll just leave.”
Although he began working at Georgia Southern in 2024 on the Armstrong Campus 1,174 miles away from Midwestern State, Hinchman wanted to see the Mustangs succeed and maintained his work with the team. Working alongside his research team, Hinchman saw their revised coaching philosophy quickly pay off, noting from a distance that players and staff were forming significantly closer bonds.
“We saw them really start to take the player into account as a human as opposed to just a commodity,” said Hinchman. “There was one coach I was worried about because he was not being as interactive as before, but then I realized it was because he was listening more.”
While Hinchman does not claim that his work with the team made the difference in their championship season, he does hope that his work with the team can become a model for other programs to follow. With the rise of paid compensation for college players and roster changes based on business needs, Hinchman wants for the human relationship between player and coach to find a new way to thrive.
“Players are switching universities year-to-year, and it’s really because nobody has connected with them on the human level,” said Hinchman. “We’re hoping to expand this to other universities to build a foundation of how we can communicate better with our players so they feel valued and want to stay as opposed to feeling like they have to leave.”