Abstract
Self-regulated sport practice is a topic of interest to mental performance consultants (MPCs) working on adolescents’ psychology of practice (Young et al., 2025). Its application entails supporting athletes’ use of psychological processes to optimize self-directed facets of skill acquisition. This study explored how MPCs would develop their case conceptualization for competitive adolescent athletes based on interpretations of the Self-Regulation of Sport Practice (SRSP) survey (Wilson et al., 2021). Twelve Canadian MPCs completed mock SRSPs for a client. They were interviewed about client scores assigned and implications for client application regarding the SRSP’s three metacognitive scales: planning; checking-in; evaluating-reflecting. Using a pragmatic paradigm, reflexive thematic analysis initially characterized the ‘survey as discussion tool’, wherein the ‘scores matter, as long as they serve dialogue’. For each scale, engagement themes addressed what MPCs: (i) needed to further figure out in their consulting role; (ii) wished to act on to enhance athletes’ proficiencies. For planning, MPCs wanted to act on various subthemes: incentivizing planning; ‘just ahead planning’; preparing for practice; complementing goals with intentions; types of targets; cognitive load; ‘planning times and places’; reminder strategies. For checking-in, they wished to aid athletes with identifying productive attentional targets, ‘on balance checking-in’, and mindfulness of checking. For evaluating-reflecting, they wanted to address awareness, projecting to higher scores and future practice, ‘setting a neutral’, deflecting time-based performance outcomes, interpolating process elements that constitute practice tasks, and reinforcing strengths. Finally, the MPCs noted intersections between scales by encouraging athletes to effectively align evaluating-reflecting with planning and checking-in.
