Psychological safety has become one of the most cited concepts in sports performance literature, and one of the most consistently misapplied. The term, drawn from organisational psychology research conducted at Harvard Business School by Amy Edmondson in the late 1990s, was developed to describe workplace conditions where team members feel secure enough to take interpersonal risks without fear of punishment. Its migration into athletic coaching has produced a version of the concept that frequently bears little resemblance to the original, and that distortion is creating measurable problems at the developmental level.
The misapplication follows a predictable pattern. Coaches, particularly at the youth and high school levels, encounter the phrase in professional development contexts and interpret it as a mandate for comfort. Standards get softened. Accountability structures loosen. Athletes who need clear expectations and consistent feedback instead receive an environment calibrated around conflict avoidance. The result is not psychological safety in any meaningful sense; it is the operational appearance of care without the substance of it.
Edmondson’s original research was conducted in hospital settings, where the stakes of interpersonal risk were immediate and the cost of silence was measurable in patient outcomes. The conditions she identified as safety-producing were not low-expectation environments. They were high-expectation environments where leadership had established sufficient trust that team members could flag errors, disagree openly, and ask questions without social penalty. The distinction matters because the coaching application of her framework has inverted that logic almost entirely.
The question of how to hold athletes to demanding standards while maintaining the kind of relational trust that produces genuine development is one that experienced coaches have navigated empirically for decades, well before the terminology entered mainstream coaching discourse. Coach Kathy Taylor, a national championship coach with more than 30 years of experience across NCAA Division I, II, and III programs, has addressed this directly in recent public conversations, making the case that high standards and psychological safety are not competing values but interdependent ones. Her framing that real safety for athletes derives from consistent expectations and demonstrated care operating together, not from the absence of pressure, is a more accurate rendering of what Edmondson’s research actually described than most coaching literature currently reflects.
That argument has practical implications for how programs are structured at every level. An athlete who does not know what is expected of her, or who has learned that expressed effort and genuine indifference will be met with the same response, is not operating in a psychologically safe environment. She is operating in an ambiguous one. Ambiguity produces anxiety. Anxiety produces risk aversion. Risk aversion is the precise condition that psychological safety, properly understood, is designed to eliminate.
The parental layer complicates this further. In club and youth sports environments where parent communication has become continuous and often unmediated, the coach-athlete relationship frequently gets interrupted before the trust conditions necessary for genuine safety can develop. Kathy Taylor has noted that when parents insert themselves into the feedback loop between coach and athlete, they often do so with protective intent but produce the opposite of protection. Athletes who are shielded from the productive discomfort that builds the very resilience their parents are trying to preserve.
The coaching profession has not developed a consistent framework for communicating these distinctions to the parents, administrators, and athletes who shape the environment in which coaches work. Resources that engage the question seriously, from practitioners with enough experience to speak from documented outcomes rather than theory, remain relatively scarce. Coach Kathy Taylor, whose career spans championship programs across New York and the broader Northeast and who has engaged these questions across multiple public platforms, represents a practitioner voice that the field has not yet developed sufficient infrastructure to amplify systematically. The gap between what experienced coaches understand about athlete development and what gets transmitted through formal coaching education channels remains one of the sport’s most consequential structural problems.
