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Norms & Methods

What an athletic director reads before they buy.

Validated instruments, normed cohorts, reliability thresholds, and citations. The GRW Sport proprietary composites are calibrated against published psychometrics — not treated as a replacement for them.

Validated instruments

Available 2026-Q3

Scoring math for each instrument ships today (see lib/sport/). Athlete-facing intake forms are added in Q3.

ACSI-28 — Athletic Coping Skills Inventory

Smith, Schutz, Smoll & Ptacek (1995) · 28 items

Structure
7 subscales, 4 items each: coping with adversity, peaking under pressure, goal-setting / mental prep, concentration, freedom from worry, confidence & achievement motivation, coachability.
Scoring
Each item 0..3. Subscale score = sum (0..12). Personal Coping Resources composite = sum of subscales (0..84).
Use in GRW Sport
GRW Sport default. Highest-cited sport psychometric. Used to validate the eight proprietary GRW composites by correlation against the seven subscales.
Reference
Smith, R. E., Schutz, R. W., Smoll, F. L., & Ptacek, J. T. (1995). Development and validation of a multidimensional measure of sport-specific psychological skills: The Athletic Coping Skills Inventory–28. Journal of Sport & Exercise Psychology.

SMTQ — Sports Mental Toughness Questionnaire

Sheard, Golby & van Wersch (2009) · 14 items

Structure
Three factors: confidence (6 items), constancy (4 items), control (4 items).
Scoring
Each item 1..4. Factor score = sum. Mental Toughness Total = sum across all factors (14..56).
Use in GRW Sport
Faster alternative when ACSI-28 is too long to administer. Open access; validated in cross-cultural samples.
Reference
Sheard, M., Golby, J., & van Wersch, A. (2009). Progress toward construct validation of the Sports Mental Toughness Questionnaire (SMTQ). European Journal of Psychological Assessment.

TOPS-2 — Test of Performance Strategies

Hardy et al. (2010) · 64 items

Structure
8 competition strategies + 8 practice strategies.
Scoring
Each item Likert; subscale scores reported separately for competition and practice contexts.
Use in GRW Sport
Optional add-on for programs aligned with USOC / AIS / English Institute of Sport methodology.
Reference
Hardy, L., Roberts, R., Thomas, P. R., & Murphy, S. M. (2010). Test of Performance Strategies (TOPS): Instrument refinement using confirmatory factor analysis. Psychology of Sport and Exercise.

Cohort norms architecture

Cohort key
Every composite score is reported against a cohort cell keyed by (sport, age band, sex, level). The 5 age bands are 8-12 / 13-15 / 16-18 / 19-22 / 23+.
Minimum cell size
A cell must have n ≥ 30 before its percentile is reported. Smaller cells return an explicit below-threshold flag — never an imputed number.
Nearest-neighbor fallback
When the exact cell is below threshold, the system relaxes one dimension at a time (level → sex → age band) and reports which neighbor cell was used. Caller-visible.
Privacy
The cohort table stores aggregate cell statistics only — mean, std, n. No individual sessions or identifiers ever land in the norm table.
Update cadence
Cells re-seed monthly. The growing-n threshold means early cells may be marked below-threshold and graduate as the platform sees more sessions.

Validation thresholds

  • ✓Reliability (ICC, test–retest, 3-session window): target ≥ 0.70 for any composite reported as a primary score; lower-reliability composites are reported as exploratory only.
  • ✓Convergent validity: each of the 8 GRW composites is correlated against the 7 ACSI-28 subscales per cohort cell. Cells with r ≥ 0.6 pass; cells with r < 0.6 are flagged for review and surfaced in the per-cohort validation report.
  • ✓External validity: the platform does not yet claim outcome prediction (draft, scholarship, win-loss). When that work is published it will appear here with sample size, model card, and pre-registration link.

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