Julie Sutcliffe join Vanderbilt in 2022 as assistant athletic director for sport psychology and mental performance.
Sutcliffe previously spent four years as assistant director of sport psychology in athletics and a clinical assistant professor in the department of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford. In that role, her responsibilities included providing comprehensive sport psychology services for more than 900 student-athletes across all 36 Cardinal varsity teams, with duties requiring evaluation, risk assessments, performance consultations and counseling. Sutcliffe also helped design and provide team-based performance psychology interventions and consultations, assisted with mental health screening and brief consultation services during pre-participation exams, and designed and implemented educational programming for staff and student-athlete development.
From 2016-18, she was a clinical and sport psychologist at Northwestern, where she conducted psychological evaluations and provided individual and group counseling and crisis services for the school’s approximately 500 student-athletes in 19 sport programs. In addition to delivering performance enhancement interventions to student-athletes and coaches—including the football team during a stretch of making three straight postseason appearances—Sutcliffe increased the number of outreach, educational programming and performance enhancement interventions by more than 200 percent from the previous year. During that time, she also served as the team sport psychologist for the USA women’s national rugby 15s for a year and a half, traveling with the team to the 2017 Women’s Rugby World Cup.
Sutcliffe is a graduate of Vassar with a degree in psychology, adding a master’s degree in kinesiology with a specialization in sport and exercise psychology from UNC Greensboro and a doctor of psychology degree in clinical psychology from Denver in 2015. She completed a pre-doctoral internship at Denver as well as a postdoctoral fellowship at Northwestern. Sutcliffe is a licensed psychologist in three states and a certified mental performance consultant with the Association for Applied Sport Psychology.
She and her husband, Josh, reside in Nashville with their daughters, Brynn, Hadley, and Kenna.