Can I use this without any software?

Yes, and plenty of coaches do. It works as a daily message, a pinned form or a spreadsheet. The limit is not collection, it is reading it back consistently across a roster once you pass roughly fifteen athletes.

Should the ratings be 1-5 or 1-10?

Five is easier to answer quickly and reliably. Ten gives an illusion of precision that most people cannot apply consistently — the difference between a 6 and a 7 is not stable within one person, let alone across a squad.

How long before the data is useful?

Around two weeks. You need enough history to know what normal looks like for that athlete before a deviation from it means anything.

Daily athlete check-in template

The best check-in is the one your athletes still complete in week six. This one is built around that constraint rather than around everything it would be nice to know.

Why it is this short

A four-minute wellness questionnaire gets completed enthusiastically for about ten days. Then it gets skipped on busy mornings, then on ordinary ones, and within a month you have partial data on your most engaged athletes and nothing on anyone else.

That failure is worse than having no check-in at all, because the missing data is not random. The athletes who stop filling it in are disproportionately the ones under pressure — exactly the population you built it for.

So length is not a convenience question. It determines whether the thing produces usable data.

The template

Paste into your messaging app, a form tool, a shared note or a spreadsheet column set. Same four ratings every day, same scale, same direction.

Copy and paste — no signup

DAILY CHECK-IN — [athlete name] — [date]

Rate 1-5 (1 = very poor, 5 = very good)

Energy:      _
Mood:        _
Soreness:    _   (1 = very sore, 5 = no soreness)
Motivation:  _

Anything I should know? (optional, one line)
> 

---
Optional, only if relevant today:
Trained:     Y / N
What:        
How it felt: easier than expected / as expected / harder than expected

How to use it

Keep the scale direction consistent: Soreness is the one that trips people up — a high number has to mean the same thing every day or the trend is meaningless. This template flips it so 5 is always good across all four.
Same time every day: Morning, before training, before the day has happened to them. A check-in completed at 9pm is rating the day, not the readiness.
Do not add fields without removing one: Every extra question costs compliance across the whole roster. If a field would not change what you do, it is costing you data on the fields that would.
Visibly act on it: The single biggest driver of long-term compliance. Athletes who see their check-in change what a coach says to them keep doing it; athletes who suspect it disappears into a spreadsheet stop.

What to watch for in the responses

Direction over absolutes. One 2 out of 5 means little; three days drifting down means something. Compare each athlete to their own normal rather than to each other — some people never rate anything above a 4 and some never below.

Frequently asked

Can I use this without any software?: Yes, and plenty of coaches do. It works as a daily message, a pinned form or a spreadsheet. The limit is not collection, it is reading it back consistently across a roster once you pass roughly fifteen athletes.
Should the ratings be 1-5 or 1-10?: Five is easier to answer quickly and reliably. Ten gives an illusion of precision that most people cannot apply consistently — the difference between a 6 and a 7 is not stable within one person, let alone across a squad.
How long before the data is useful?: Around two weeks. You need enough history to know what normal looks like for that athlete before a deviation from it means anything.

When reading it back becomes the bottleneck

Loadwell runs this exact check-in, builds a baseline per athlete and sorts your roster by who has moved. Free for 14 days, no card required.

Explore a sample roster Daily athlete check-ins

14-day free trial. No card required to start.