NTangible says Clutch Factor test can predict athlete performance under pressure

Connerty, a former professional baseball player turned sports-tech entrepreneur, told TechCrunch that the company wanted to focus on clutch performance. He described cognitive science as a black box that had not been measured accurately before. The assessment was developed with Levine, a professor emeritus at the University of South Florida. It is inspired by the Thematic Apperception Test, 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 are no right or wrong answers, Connerty said. The keywords a respondent uses, the way they use those words and the semantic phrasing are scored against a neurolinguistic scoring guide psychologists created, producing a clutch factor score. The score ranges from 0 to 1000. Connerty said an athlete who scores over 750 is twice as likely to commit to a Division I school. He said the number can be used in rankings, leaderboards, recruiting conversations, NIL conversations and scholarship conversations, especially in collegiate sports, where he said programs are writing $4 million checks to quarterbacks.

A possible flaw in the product is that athletes seeking to impress coaches and recruiters may answer questions dishonestly to get a higher clutch score. TechCrunch reported that when a reporter took the quiz honestly, the score was 584, below average, which did not surprise the reporter because of a dread of high-leverage situations while playing high school sports. When the reporter took the quiz a second time, answering as an imagined level-headed, clutch top recruit might respond, the score was 802.

Connerty thinks 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 improving their mental game. TechCrunch reported that the platform could work better as a way for coaches to learn more about their athletes and help them improve in weaker areas.

NTangible now supports testing for nine sports, though Connerty’s background is in baseball. He also has ambitions to expand the clutch test to corporate settings so that HR departments can evaluate employees’ strengths and weaknesses under pressure. The NTerpret assessment translates more directly to the workplace: respondents answer 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 appears to be selling to sports organizations and companies directly, rather than to individual athletes. The company will elaborate on its strategy on stage Wednesday at TechCrunch Disrupt, where it is currently among the top 20 companies dueling for the grand prize at Startup Battlefield. Disrupt is being held Tuesday through Thursday, Oct. 13 to 15, in downtown San Francisco.