Coach's guide
Athlete Wellness Questionnaire
A simple, repeatable way to ask your players how they slept, how they feel, and how their bodies are holding up — so you can spot the ones who need an easier day before something goes wrong.
What an athlete wellness questionnaire actually is
An athlete wellness questionnaire is a short set of questions you ask your players every day — usually a few hours before practice or a game. It is not a medical assessment. It is a quick, honest snapshot of how each player arrived at the gym that day: how much they slept, how much energy they have, how sore they are, and how they are feeling mentally.
The point is not to collect data for its own sake. The point is to give the coach a single glance — a readiness board — that shows who is good to push, who is fine, and who is worth a quiet word before tip-off.
The questions that actually matter
A good wellness questionnaire for a sports team keeps to four or five questions. Anything more and players stop answering honestly. Here is the set we recommend, and why each one earns its place.
How many hours did you sleep?
Sleep is the single biggest input into how a player performs and recovers. Ask in hours, on a 1–10 scale, so it takes one swipe to answer. A player who slept three hours is not the same player who slept eight, no matter how tough they are.
How is your mental health today? (1–10)
Athletes carry everything the rest of their life carries — school, work, relationships, stress. A 1–10 mental health question, asked the same way every day, lets a coach notice a slow slide before it becomes a crisis. It is not a diagnosis; it is a prompt for a conversation.
How is your energy? (1–4)
Energy tells you whether last practice's load landed or whether the player is still paying it off. A four-point scale (Full, Pretty good, Tired, Empty) is enough — more granularity than that is noise.
How sore are you?
Soreness flags whether a muscle group is still recovering. Track it generally — None, A little, A lot — and let the player add a note if something specific hurts.
For female athletes: where are you in your cycle?
Cycle phase changes how a body tolerates load, recovers, and even how ligaments behave. Coaches do not need details — just a general phase, so the squad's training can be shaped around the people actually in it.
How to turn the answers into a readiness score
Each answer maps to a weight. In Schumer's Check In, sleep hours and mental health each count for 15% of readiness, energy for 35%, and soreness for 35%. Add them up and you get a single number per player per day. A player at 85 is good to go; a player at 45 is an easy-day candidate.
The exact weights matter less than consistency. Pick a formula, stick with it for a season, and you will start to see patterns — the player who crashes every Wednesday, the one whose readiness tanks after travel, the squad that needs a lighter Friday before Saturday's game.
Keep it discreet
Players will only answer honestly if they trust that the answers stay between them and the coach. That means: no posting scores in the locker room, no sharing a player's cycle details, no using a low mental-health day as a teaching moment in front of the team.
A good system shows the coach a gentle, de-identified nudge — "worth a quiet word" — instead of raw numbers, and it keeps sensitive details like cycle phase private to the player. The coach sees the pattern; the player keeps their dignity.
Ask on the right days
A daily wellness questionnaire works best when it matches the team's rhythm. For a basketball team that practises Monday, Wednesday, and Friday evenings with a Saturday game, check-ins on those four days — plus an after-practice follow-up — are enough. Pestering players on rest days just teaches them to ignore the notification.
The tool that does it for you
You can run an athlete wellness questionnaire on paper, in a shared spreadsheet, or in a group chat — and most teams start there. The trouble is that nobody wants to read a spreadsheet of 12 players' answers before every practice, and the answers that matter most quietly stop getting filled in.
Schumer's Check In does the whole thing for free: a one-swipe daily check-in for players, an after-practice follow-up, discreet cycle tracking, a coach readiness board that flags who needs attention, and phone reminders that only fire on practice days. Set up a team in two minutes and send your players a private invite link.
Start your team — free