The study aimed to monitor differences in stress and recovery across a period before and after playoff match in a sample of collegiate male basketball players of Chinese Culture University (Division I). Eighteen collegiate basketball players (N=18) aged from 18 to 21 yrs participated in the study. Eighteen athletes completed the Recovery-Stress Questionnaire for Sport (RESTQ-Sport 52 item version) in the three testing sessions, T1 three weeks before playoff match, T2 the week of playoff match, and T3 one week after the playoff match. Based on center tendency, Total Stress mean score in T2 tended to be higher than in T1 and T3. Conversely, for Total Recovery mean score tended to be lower in T2 compared to in T1 and T3. For General Stress mean score tended to be higher in T3 more than in T1 and T2 whereas T1 tended to have the highest scores in General Recovery. Sport-specific Stress showed higher trends in T2 while Sport-specific Recovery showed lower trends than in T1 and T3 Moreover; the differences between competition phases were showed in General Stress (Emotional Stress and Fatigue) with higher mean scores in T2. Even though the result used by Friedman test was insignificant due to small sample size and the short period of study, these findings do suggest that RESTQ-Sport could be a useful tool for coaches to monitor stress and recovery in male athlete’s team-based sport during different periods of the competition.
