A score above 750 on NTangible’s Clutch Factor assessment makes an athlete twice as likely to commit to a Division I school, according to co-founder and CEO Dan Connerty. The psychological test produces scores from 0 to 1000. NTangible says those results can help predict an athlete’s performance under pressure.
Recruiters can put numbers to sprint speed, throwing velocity, and physical strength. Judging whether a player will remain calm, keep their focus, and deliver under pressure is harder. Connerty moved from professional baseball into sports technology, founding NTangible to try to measure these mental aspects of performance.
“We really wanted to hyper focus on this idea of clutch performance,” Connerty 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.”
Psychologist Dr. Ed Levine, professor emeritus at the University of South Florida, worked with Connerty to develop Clutch Factor. Its basis is the Thematic Apperception Test: people look at photographs showing ambiguous situations and offer their interpretations. They explain what’s happening, which person in the image they imagine being, and what they expect to 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.”
NTangible’s website: https://ntangible.co/
Clutch Factor assessment page: https://ntangible.co/clutch-factor/
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The predictions from that analysis could inform decisions with large amounts of money at stake, Connerty says. “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.”
Recruitment also creates a possible problem for the test: a player hoping to impress coaches might give calculated answers instead of honest ones. The TechCrunch author’s truthful responses produced a score of 584, which they described as below average. That didn’t surprise them, as they remembered dreading pressure situations in high school sports. On a second attempt, they imagined the responses of a calm, clutch, top recruit and scored 802.
For recruiters, the gap between those scores raises a question: is the assessment measuring an athlete’s ability to handle pressure, or their ability to give answers that suggest they can?
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Helping coaches understand their athletes and address weak areas might be a better use of the platform, the TechCrunch author suggested. Connerty believes being “clutch” is something athletes can learn. He isn’t presenting NTangible as a training platform, but he collaborated with former MLB sports psychologist Howie Schwartz to develop exercises athletes can use to start improving their mental game.
NTangible’s testing now covers nine sports, extending beyond Connerty’s baseball background. His plans also include adapting the clutch test for corporate use, where HR departments could evaluate employees’ strengths and weaknesses in situations involving pressure.
NTerpret, another company assessment, applies more directly to work. It asks respondents which approaches to coaching and feedback work best for them. Management can use the responses to understand how employees process instructions and act on the information they receive.
NTerpret assessment page: https://ntangible.co/nterpret/
In the TechCrunch article’s assessment, direct sales to sports organizations and companies appear to be NTangible’s most viable business model, ahead of sales to individual athletes. The company is due to discuss its strategy on Wednesday at TechCrunch Disrupt. It is among the top 20 companies in contention for the Startup Battlefield grand prize. Disrupt is scheduled for Tuesday through Thursday, October 13 to 15, in downtown San Francisco.
