Even if everyone could be fixed, we simply can't/won't make the time to fix everybody. If they don't 'seem' to have aptitude, they're going to have to do a lot of extra work to master even the basics. It can be done, but at some point, it may be the students' responsibility, not the instructor's, to get them there. What I teach isn't terribly complex like I imagine coding is, so when students don't do well, it's usually a simple matter of not doing the work. I don't know enough about coding. It must suck to have to tell someone "I don't think you're cut out for this", but I totally understand that that's what you have to do. Or maybe...since it's hard to tell if it's due to lack of aptitude, we can just say that we don't know whether or not the reason they're struggling is or isn't because of aptitude, but they're going to have to go get some special assistance in order to figure it out. Our uni has a center where students who seem to have trouble like this can go so learning specialists can spend time with them when professors have tried but can't get a student up to speed after a reasonable amount of effort expended.

In the case of the coach, it's up to the coach to decide whether to keep putting more effort in. My thinking is...he's just putting effort in by doing the same thing over and over that clearly didn't work rather than trying a new approach. What I do has more to do with the psychology of performing movement (often under stress). The reasons someone 'doesn't get it' in an academic context is different from why they might not 'get' how to do a movement like sliding. Then on top of that, the reason one person is struggling with learning to slide can be completely different from the reason another person struggles with learning to slide, so how you help each is different. (Same with coding students--there are numerous possible reasons each one stumbles, so what fixes one student won't fix another tho they all seem to have the same problem.) There are some standard ways that mental blocks can be handled, so if the player had a mental block, telling them verbally what to do over and over won't fix it, but other types of instruction, demonstrations, observations (a lot more specific details go into this), etc. can. For example, imagine...kids having a back-yard birthday party and there's slip and slide with water and, when not thinking about it, because they're in fun mode, they unthinkingly 'slide' without even needing instruction. There are ways to 'recreate' that kind of mindset so a player could just learn to slide naturally--in this case, the coach wouldn't even need to give her step-by-step instructions. The point being, he tried one thing, it didn't work, so he diagnosed her as 'untalented' rather than diagnosing himself as 'only knows one way to teach'. Sure if he tried several things and nothing took, he has to decide if she's worth further effort against his other obligations. He could refer her to a sport psychology consultant to get her unknotted. Hm. I'm waiting to see if Medium has a maximum limit on how much they let use write in responses...:)