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Coaching in the Moment

AUTHOR:

Eli Waxler

Link to Resource

Technology in sport is often associated with heart-rate monitors, GPS trackers, and video review. However, one promising use of technology for coaching may come from psychology: the Experience Sampling Method (ESM). Developed by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and colleagues to study flow in everyday life (Hektner et al., 2007), ESM can now be delivered seamlessly through smartphones and apps. For coaches, this offers a chance to move beyond performance metrics and better understand how athletes actually experience training and competition.

Capturing Lived Experience

Unlike retrospective surveys, ESM collects data in real time, asking athletes to briefly report their thoughts, feelings, and context during the day. ESM captures experiences as they unfold in real-world settings, reducing recall bias and increasing ecological validity (Shiffman et al., 2008; Trull & Ebner-Priemer, 2013). Applied to sport, this could mean coaches gain insight into when athletes are most engaged, when training feels meaningful, and when recovery is insufficient.

Measuring Daily Conditions for Athlete Flourishing

The Experience Sampling Method was originally developed within positive psychology to study the conditions of optimal experience, most famously flow, moments of total immersion when challenge and skill are balanced (Jackson & Csikszentmihalyi, 1999). That origin makes it a natural bridge from research to applied coaching. However, flow is only one pathway to thriving. ESM has been applied to capture positive emotions during daily life and physical activity (Guérin et al., 2013), to examine how basic psychological needs like autonomy and competence relate to optimal experience (Bassi & Delle Fave, 2012), and, more recently, to study how athletes self-regulate their recovery and readiness between demanding training sessions (Wilson et al., 2024). By sampling these experiences in real time, ESM gives coaches a tool to see how the daily training environment supports, or undermines, athletes’ ability to flourish.

Technology Brings It Onto the Field

Smartphones and wearables now make ESM easy to implement. Mobile experience sampling studies have been shown to be feasible and effective in capturing physical activity and health contexts (de Vries et al., 2020). For example, a coach could set up mobile check-ins asking:

  • Did you feel challenged and skilled in today’s session?
  • Did you feel physically and mentally ready?
  • How meaningful did training feel today?

When collected across weeks, these responses can be paired with training loads to show when athletes are thriving or struggling.

Practical Benefits for Coaching

Research suggests that subjective self-reports are often more sensitive than objective markers for monitoring athlete well-being (Saw et al., 2016). For coaches, this means that ESM can:

  • Identify drills or conditions that are consistently perceived positively.
  • Flag early signs of fatigue or burnout.
  • Facilitate conversations about motivation and recovery.
  • Reinforce strengths by highlighting when athletes feel at their best.

Recent work has introduced sport-specific mobile ESM tools such as Psixport, designed to collect real-time data on injured athletes’ cognitive appraisals, emotional responses, behaviors, and pain perceptions during rehabilitation. The study evaluating this tool showed that this approach provides more accurate information than retrospective reports and was rated as usable and acceptable by athletes (González-Barato et al., 2021).

Final Thought

ESM was designed to capture the quality of everyday life. With today’s technology, it can also capture the quality of athletic life. By integrating short, meaningful check-ins as routine practice, coaches can create training environments that prioritize not only performance but also athlete well-being and growth. In doing so, they bring the spirit of positive psychology directly into the day-to-day of sport.

References

Bassi, M., & Fave, A. D. (2012). Optimal experience and self-determination at school: Joining perspectives. Motivation and Emotion, 36(4), 425–438. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11031-011-9268-z

de Vries, L. P., Baselmans, B. M. L., & Bartels, M. (2021). Smartphone-Based Ecological Momentary Assessment of Well-Being: A Systematic Review and Recommendations for Future Studies. Journal of Happiness Studies, 22(5), 2361–2408. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10902-020-00324-7