Athlete-Centered Coaching (ACC) is designed to empower athletes by supporting their psychological needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness. While ACC is increasingly applied in mainstream sport, its use in disability sport contexts, especially with youth athletes with visual impairments, remains underexplored. Goalball, a Paralympic sport developed for athletes with visual impairments, provides a unique setting to examine how coaches support or constrain youth athletes’ psychological needs through ACC strategies and how athletes per-ceive these experiences in training and competition. This qualitative-descriptive study was guided by the Self-Determination Theory (SDT) and involved semi-structured interviews with nine coaches and ten youth athletes (ages 14–17) from across North America. Coaches’ data were analyzed thematically using a deductive approach to explore how ACC was understood and how coaching strategies supported or constrained athletes’ psychological needs. Athletes’ data were analyzed inductively to identify patterns in how they experienced training and com-petition, and how they perceived coaches in relation to autonomy, competence, and relatedness. Four themes were identified among coaches, including: Helping Athletes Find Their Voice, Learning the Game Without Seeing It, Goalball Isn’t Just a Sport – It’s a Family, and Have We Always Been Athlete-Centered From the athletes, three main themes emerged: We Just Want to Scrimmage, Managing the Pressure During Competition, and My Coach Knows How to Support Me. While many goalball coaches value athlete growth, well-being and athlete empowerment, most apply athlete-centered principles intuitively rather than intentionally. The concept of ACC was unfamiliar to several participants, suggesting a need for greater awareness and training within disability sport contexts. Athletes consistently expressed a preference for learning through scrimmages and small-sided games rather than repetitive drills, and relied on peer sup-port to manage pressure during training and competition. Practical applications include enhanc-ing coaching education with disability-specific strategies, and workshops co-led by Paralympi-ans. Future research should explore ACC within team-based coach-athlete dyads and examine the impact of ACC-focused interventions across a sport season.