Approximately 20% to 70% of athletes may experience some type of performance staleness during their training seasons or careers (Morgan, O'Connor, Sparling, & Pate, 1987; Nederhof, Lemmink, Visscher, Meeusen, & Mulder, 2006). While monitoring an athlete's training load, or "stress" can help prevent staleness (Kellmann & Kallus, 2001), it can also be costly, invasive, one-dimensional and time consuming. The purpose of this investigation was to construct and examine an abbreviated self-report measure of underrecovery, the "Brief Assessment of Recovery Stress" (BARS) that would be convenient and useful for applied sport psychologists. BARS is a 19-item, Likert type self-report instrument designed to efficiently assess stress recovery status perceptions more quickly than the Recovery-Stress Questionaire-76 Sport (RESTQ-76; Kellmann & Kallus). Participants were 387 undergraduate college student-athletes and non-athletes from a large southern and mid-Atlantic university. Results suggest that BARS, in its early form, is a reliable, practical instrument.