NTangible, a sports-tech startup co-founded by former pro baseball player Dan Connerty, says it has built a test that gauges how athletes perform when the stakes are high. Unlike traditional recruiting metrics—speed, strength, throwing velocity—this “Clutch Factor” assessment aims to measure mental resilience under pressure. The test draws on a psychological method to predict who thrives in high-leverage moments.
How Clutch Factor works
Connerty developed the Clutch Factor alongside psychologist Ed Levine of the University of South Florida. The test takes cues from the Thematic Apperception Test, presenting participants with ambiguous images and asking them to narrate what’s happening, who they are in the scene, and what events follow. The content of the responses—word choice, phrasing, semantics—are scored using a neurolinguistic tool built for this system. The result is a numeric score between 0 and 1,000 that’s designed to indicate how likely an athlete is to deliver under pressure. A score over 750, NTangible claims, makes an athlete twice as likely to get recruited by a Division I school.
Uses, limits, and expansion plans
NTangible believes its product has roles in recruiting, scholarship decisions, NIL discussions, and athlete rankings—especially in college sports, where pressure moments can make or break careers. However, there’s concern about how honest respondents might be; testing performance under pressure depends heavily on self-reported reactions. The founder admits some athletes might try to game the system by responding as they think evaluators want, rather than truthfully.
The company suggests another use case is as a development tool: helping athletes identify mental skills to improve, though it’s not positioning itself as a full training platform. A sports psychologist helped design a set of mental exercises that athletes could use to build mental preparedness. NTangible now offers the assessment in nine sports beyond baseball, and wants to adapt the model for business settings. Its workplace tool, called NTerpret, asks employees how they respond to feedback and coaching and aims to assess how they handle stress and instruction in high-pressure situations.
NTangible’s commercial strategy centers on selling directly to sports organizations and companies rather than individuals. Connerty will present the company’s approach and roadmap at the TechCrunch Disrupt Startup Battlefield competition, where NTangible is one of the top 20 contenders.
What this means:
Measuring what has traditionally been considered unquantifiable—mental toughness under pressure—fills a large gap in how athletes are evaluated today. While NTangible’s approach holds promise, it also rests on critical assumptions about honesty in responses and the predictive validity of its scoring system. Moving forward, its success will depend on how extensively its test is validated, whether it can resist misuse or gaming, and how well it scales across different sports and corporate contexts. This is a product to watch in recruiting, sports psychology, and performance analytics.
