From Senior Project to ‘Something Bigger’: This Psychology Research Started at SAAS

By: Sarah-Mae McCullough, Editorial Content Manager​​​​​

Over half of all kids aged 6-17 in the US play sports, according to the National Survey of Children’s Health – but how does that experience impact them? Do common practices in youth sports programs meet the developmental needs of young athletes, and how do those young athletes feel about them? 

Two Seattle Academy students investigated these questions, and more, alongside SAAS teacher Sarah Smith and University of Washington researcher Julie McCleery, for their Senior Project. Their work – analyzing hundreds of their peers’ reflections after learning about the psychology of youth sports – developed into a full-fledged research paper that was published in the academic journal “Youth” earlier this year. 

For student researchers Chloe Stanton ’23 and Beatrice Wurfel ’23, the project was a chance to dive deeper into a professional interest, make a real impact, and start college ahead of the curve with research skills. 

From SAAS psychology class to published research

The research paper, titled “Learning from Youth Voice: Student Reflections on Common Approaches in Youth Sports,” grew out of Intro to Psychology, a SAAS course that longtime teacher, coach, and athlete Sarah Smith created in 2019. While brainstorming the class’ curriculum, she knew she wanted to include sports psychology, a topic she’d been interested in since she rowed on the US national team. 

Each year, Sarah invites Julie McCleery – her former rowing coach and a researcher at UW’s Center for Leadership in Athletics – to be a guest speaker in the class, focusing on topics such as stages of athlete development and the impacts of different coaching practices. Then, students write reflections on what they learned.

The reflections “really make kids think a lot,” Sarah says. “Like, ‘What have I experienced in sports, and has it always been good? Did I stop playing a sport because it was not developmentally appropriate for me?’” Over four years, Sarah and Julie collected 332 student reflections. When Chloe and Beatrice approached Sarah to be their Senior Project advisor in 2023, the two adults already had an idea in mind: using those reflections as the basis for a research project.

After Sarah removed identifying information in the student responses, Chloe and Beatrice, with Julie’s mentorship, coded and analyzed them. The students also conducted a literature review, wrote an abstract for the paper, and researched academic journals to submit it to before graduating SAAS. Julie then finished writing the paper and submitted it to “Youth.” 

Knowing the paper could be published – that “this could turn into something bigger” – made the whole process more exciting, Chloe says. Beatrice agrees: “It was very rewarding to have a tangible piece of work come out of that and to be able to say I have something that’s published.” 

‘Missing and essential’: Adding youth voices to the conversation

Phrases like “it really opened my eyes” and “this gave me a new perspective” were common openers among the hundreds of student reflections, as Cardinals considered what they’d learned in class. Some of the most common themes included the impacts of specializing in a specific sport and training to compete at a young age, and having physical activity such as running be used as a punishment. 

“I have seen many of my friends quit gymnastics because their coaches push them too far and they don’t have time to rest,” one student reflected. Another wrote about running as a punishment in youth sports programs: “I’ve been running of my own volition, and I actually love it — but running ‘lines’ or ‘suicides’ or whatever else in the context of a sport still feels awful. Honestly, it made me wonder if that’s part of the reason I ‘hated’ running for so long.”

Some students also reflected on potential next steps, from using more positive reinforcement in coaching to creating more student access to sports psychologists. 

In efforts to make youth sports programs as healthy and safe as possible, “youth voice is a missing and essential component of change,” notes the paper’s conclusion. The research team hopes that arming young people as well as adults with information about developmentally appropriate practices in youth sports will help move the field in the right direction. 

“I think future coaches and people who are working with kids in sports, even parents who want their kids to go into a professional athlete development track, could all benefit from understanding what is healthy,” Chloe says. “Listening to youth voices is very important.” 

The student involvement “makes the research more valuable, more actionable,” Julie says. “Instead of it just being in a journal that only researchers read, we're more connected with the population that we hope will activate the information or have knowledge that can help improve their experiences.” 

Welcome to the real world! Lessons learned through a Senior Project

For both Chloe and Beatrice, their Senior Project experience did just what it was supposed to: it helped them explore a career interest and leave high school with real work experience in that area. 

Chloe expects to conduct more research as a student at Scripps College, and she’s already applied her new knowledge to her job coaching field sports at a summer camp. Many of her peers in college are learning to do original research for the first time, she says – so getting that head start in high school was “super special.” 

Beatrice, who discovered her passion for psychology in Sarah’s class, is now studying the subject at Northeastern University. She aspires to both contribute to more research and eventually enter clinical psychology. Now, as she applies for co-ops (work experiences similar to internships), “it’s really great to be able to say I worked on an academic paper that was published,” she says. “That holds a lot of credibility in the psych realm.”