Tangible bets could predict the performance of athletes under pressure

NTangible is building an analytics platform for collegiate sports organizations and other clubs to measure an athlete's "clutch" factor.

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When college athletic programs recruit athletes, they can measure specific metrics such as a player's sprint speed, throwing speed, and physical strength. But there has never been a clear way to quantify the mental aspects of sports—how well will the athlete perform in high-pressure situations? Do they stay calm, focus and give their best shot? Or do they panic and collapse in the spotlight?

Dan Connerty, co-founder and CEO of NTangible, thinks he's discovered the secret to measuring a player's performance in the most important moments.

"We really wanted to 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 no one wanted to touch because no one had ever been able to measure it accurately."

Along with psychologist Dr. Ed Levine, 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 Subjective Recognition Test, a psychological examination in which people are presented with pictures 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 is no right or wrong answer," Connerty said. "The keywords you use, the way in which you use those words, and the semantic expressions associated with them are scored against a neurolinguistic scoring guide that psychologists have created, giving you your clutch factor score."

The score ranges from 0 to 1,000, and according to Connerty, an athlete who scores over 750 is twice as likely to commit to a Division I school.

"What we've been able to do is use this analysis, where we can show predictive ability," he said. This number can be used heavily in rankings, leaderboards, recruiting conversations, NIL conversations, and scholarship conversations, especially in the crazy wild west that is college sports right now, where we're writing $4 million checks to the players on the team.

However, a potential flaw in the product could be that athletes looking to impress coaches and recruiters may answer dishonest questions in order to earn a higher clutch score. When I took the test and answered honestly, I got a below-average score of 584, which I wasn't surprised about—I was afraid of leverage situations when I played high school sports. I scored 802 when I ran the contest a second time and responded as I imagined a very level, clutch, high soldier might respond.

Perhaps this platform will serve as a way for coaches to learn more about athletes and help them improve in their weaker areas. Connerty thinks clutch is a skill that can be taught. While he doesn't position NTangible as a training platform, he did work with former MLB sports psychologist Howie Schwartz to create a list of exercises that athletes can use as a starting point to strengthen 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 assess employees' strengths and weaknesses under pressure. NTerpret's assessment translates more directly to the workplace—the respondent answers questions about how they best respond to coaching and feedback, providing management with data on how that employee processes instructions and performs based on the information.

NTangible's most viable business model appears to be selling directly to sports organizations and companies, not to individual athletes. The company will explain its strategy on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt on Wednesday, where it's currently among the top 20 companies dueling for the big prize in the 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, taking place Tuesday-Thursday, October 13-15, in downtown San Francisco.

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Amanda Silberling is a senior writer at TechCrunch covering the intersection of technology and culture. He has also written for publications such as Polygon, MTV, Kenyon Review, NPR, and Business Insider. She is the co-host of Wow If True, a podcast about internet culture, with science fiction author Isabel J. Kim. Before joining TechCrunch, she worked as a grassroots organizer, museum educator, and film festival coordinator. He holds a B.A. in English from the University of Pennsylvania and served as a Princeton Fellow in Asia in Laos.

You can contact or confirm Amanda by emailing [email protected] or via encrypted message to @amanda.100 on Signal.

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