The primary text in sport psychology's engagement with flow theory, co-authored by jackson and csikszentmihalyi and published by Human Kinetics in 1999. The book reports Jackson's empirical research on flow in elite athletes, presents the Flow State Scale (FSS) measurement instrument, and provides practical guidance for coaches and athletes seeking to create conditions for peak performance.
The empirical basis
jackson's research, which forms the empirical core of the book, drew on extensive qualitative interviews with elite athletes across multiple sports and quantitative data from the Flow State Scale she developed. The FSS operationalized csikszentmihalyi's nine dimensions of flow-state in language appropriate for athletic experience — translating phenomenological descriptions from chess players and musicians into terms that resonated with athletes' experience of competition and performance.
The interview findings documented conditions that elite athletes associated with flow: pre-competition preparation and physical readiness, confidence built from training, the ability to maintain a process focus (on execution) rather than outcome focus (on winning), and the contribution of team cohesion in team sports to individual flow experience. These conditions were specific to athletic contexts in ways that csikszentmihalyi's original model, developed with cognitively and artistically focused populations, had not specified.
Why flow is difficult to study in sports
The methodological challenge is fundamental: ESM requires interrupting participants to self-report, which is impossible during active competition. Jackson's solution — the retrospective FSS administered immediately after performance — traded ecological validity (in-the-moment experience) for feasibility. The book is explicit about this limitation: FSS measures what athletes remember experiencing and their interpretation of that experience, not a neutral record of the state itself.
This matters for the KB because sport psychology flow claims carry a different evidential status than ESM-based claims. The ESM data in being-adolescent and optimal-experience-edited-volume captures self-reports during activities; Jackson's FSS data captures retrospective reconstruction. Both are self-report, but the memory and interpretation processes in retrospective accounts add confounds. The book's claims should be read with this in mind.
Practical applications
The second half of the book translates the research findings into practical guidance for coaches and athletes. The prescriptions follow from the conditions Jackson's research identified: pre-competition routines that establish the right psychological state, training designs that create conditions of appropriate challenge, cuing strategies that redirect attention from outcomes to process, and team culture practices that support collective conditions for individual flow.
The book is careful to distinguish between controllable antecedents (preparation, training, routines — where athletes and coaches can act) and the flow state itself (which cannot be directly willed into existence; attempting to force flow typically prevents it). This distinction is important for the practical literature: flow is prepared for, not commanded.
Position in the lineage
Flow in Sports is the canonical text for flow in athletic performance and the primary reference for the sport psychology extension of the flow tradition. It validates the core framework in a new domain through primary empirical research (rather than merely applying the framework speculatively), and it contributes the FSS measurement instrument that enabled subsequent sport psychology flow research. The book represents the legitimate domain-extension model: new domain, new measurement tool, primary empirical research, domain-specific conditions identified.