NTangible bets it can predict how athletes will perform under pressure

When collegiate sports programs recruit athletes, they can measure concrete metrics like a player’s sprint speed, throwing velocity, and physical strength. But there has never been a clear way to quantify the mental aspects of sports — how well will this athlete perform in high-pressure situations? Will they stay calm, focus, and give it their best shot? Or will they panic in the spotlight and mess up?

NTangible co-founder and CEO Dan Connerty thinks he’s unlocked the secret to measuring if 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, told TechCrunch. “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.”

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 an athlete is to 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 1000 and, 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 possible flaw in the product, however, could be that athletes seeking to impress coaches and recruiters may answer the questions dishonestly to get a higher clutch score. When I took the quiz and answered honestly, I got a below average score of 584, which didn’t surprise me — I dreaded high-leverage situations when I played high school sports. When I took the quiz a second time, answering as I imagined a very level-headed, clutch, top recruit might respond, I scored an 802.

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 isn’t 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.

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.

NTangible’s most viable business model seems to be selling to sports organizations and companies directly, rather than to individual athletes. The company will elaborate on its strategy on stage on Wednesday at TechCrunch Disrupt, where it’s currently among the top 20 companies dueling for the grand prize at Startup Battlefield.

You can check out the rest of the field, and the investors who will decide the winner, by joining us in person this week at Disrupt, happening Tuesday through Thursday, October 13 to 15, in downtown San Francisco.