When collegiate sports programs recruit athletes, they can measure sprint speed, throwing velocity, and physical strength. But the mental side of sports has always been difficult to quantify. How will athletes perform under pressure? Will they stay calm, focus, and deliver? Or will they panic in the spotlight and fall apart?
NTangible co-founder and CEO Dan Connerty believes he has unlocked a way to measure whether a player will execute in the most important moments.
“We really wanted to hyper focus on this idea of clutch performance,” Connerty, a professional baseball player turned sports-tech entrepreneur, said. “Cognitive [science] itself is just this black box that nobody’s wanted to touch, because nobody’s had the ability to measure it accurately prior.”
How the Clutch Factor Assessment Works
Alongside psychologist Dr. Ed Levine, a professor emeritus at the University of South Florida, Connerty developed a psychological assessment that he says can predict how likely athletes perform under pressure. The Clutch Factor assessment is inspired by the Thematic Apperception Test, a psychological examination in which people are presented with photos of ambiguous situations and describe what they see happening, who they imagine themselves to be in the scene, and what they think might happen next.
“There’s no right or wrong answers,” Connerty said. “The key words that you use, the way in which you use those words, and the semantic phrasing associated with it get scored against the neurolinguistic scoring guide that psychologists created, and it shoots out your clutch factor score.”
The score is between 0 and 1,000. According to Connerty, an athlete who scores over a 750 is twice as likely to commit to a Division I school.
“What we’ve been able to do is leverage this analysis, where we can show the predictive ability,” he said. “This number can be heavily used in rankings, leaderboards, recruiting conversations, NIL conversations, and scholarship conversations, especially in the crazy wild west that is collegiate sports right now, where we’re writing $4 million checks to quarterbacks.”
A Potential Flaw in the Scoring
A possible flaw in the product could be that athletes seeking to impress coaches and recruiters may answer the questions dishonestly to get a higher clutch score. When a reporter took the quiz and answered honestly, the result was a below-average score of 584, which did not surprise her since she dreaded high-leverage situations when she played high school sports. When she took the quiz a second time, answering as she imagined a very level-headed, clutch, top recruit might respond, she scored 802.
That gap raises real questions about whether the assessment captures genuine mental toughness or simply a player’s ability to read what recruiters want to hear.
Clutch as a Trainable Skill
Perhaps the platform would work better as a way for coaches to learn more about their athletes and help them improve in weaker areas. Connerty thinks that “clutch” is a skill that can be trained. While he is not positioning NTangible as a training platform, he worked with former MLB sports psychologist Howie Schwartz to create a list of exercises that athletes can use as a starting point for upping their mental game.
Expanding Beyond Baseball
While Connerty’s background is in baseball, NTangible now supports testing for nine sports. He also has ambitions to expand the clutch test to apply to corporate settings, so that HR departments can evaluate employees’ strengths and weaknesses under pressure. The NTerpret assessment translates more directly to the workplace. The respondent answers questions about how they best respond to coaching and feedback, giving management data on how that employee processes instructions and acts on information.
Why This Matters for Recruiting
For coaches and recruiters, the appeal of a clutch factor score is clear. Physical metrics can tell you how fast an athlete runs or how hard they throw, but they cannot tell you who will freeze in a championship game. If the assessment holds up over time, it could give programs a new data point in the high-stakes world of collegiate recruiting, NIL deals, and scholarship decisions.
For athletes, the tool may offer something different: a way to understand their own mental tendencies and, potentially, to train them. Whether that promise holds true may depend on how honestly players answer and how well the score predicts real performance when it matters most.
