Victoria Iwaniura¹, Corliss Bean¹

In youth sport, a coach’s gender can have an impact on athletes by shaping perceptions, team culture and dynamics, and psychological safety. Psychological safety is described as a social environment created by leaders, coaches, and teams which allows athletes to take risks, disclose personal or mental health concerns, and make mistakes. Coaches have been identified as having the potential to act both as facilitators of and barriers to psychological safety. While studies have found that the gender of coaching staff can influence individual participation (e.g., motivation), less is known about the role of coach gender on psychological safety and willingness to disclose personal or mental health concerns for girl youth athletes. The purpose of this study is to investigate the extent to which coach gender influences girl youth athletes’ perceived psychological safety and comfort in disclosing personal or mental-health concerns to their coach. High-performance female youth sports teams will be recruited. Teams will be categorized into three groups based on coaching staff gender: women-only, men-only, and mixed-gender (4 teams from each group, N = ~180-200 athletes). A mixed-methods design will be used. Participants will complete the Coach- Athlete Relationship Questionnaire (CART-Q; Jowett & Ntoumanis, 2004) and Sport Psychological Safety Inventory (SPSI; Rice et al., 2022). A subsample of participants will then be selected to participate in focus groups to further explore these perceptions (n = 30). Findings from this study may support increased efforts to recruit, train, and maintain coaches with the goal of psychologically supporting female youth athletes.