THE CRUNCH
NTangible, a sports-tech startup co-founded by former professional baseball player Dan Connerty, has developed a psychological assessment it calls the Clutch Factor, which aims to quantify how likely an athlete is to perform well under pressure. The test, built with psychologist Dr Ed Levine, is inspired by the Thematic Apperception Test: respondents describe ambiguous photos, and their word choices are scored against a neurolinguistic guide to produce a score from 0 to 1,000.
Connerty claims the score has predictive weight: athletes scoring above 750 are, according to him, twice as likely to commit to a Division I school. He sees the number feeding into rankings, recruiting, NIL and scholarship conversations in collegiate sport.
The method has an obvious weak point. TechCrunch's Amanda Silberling took the quiz twice: answering honestly she scored a below-average 584, but answering as she imagined a composed top recruit would, she scored 802. Athletes keen to impress recruiters have a clear incentive to game the test.
Connerty argues that clutch performance is a trainable skill, and the company has worked with a former MLB sports psychologist on exercises to improve weaker areas, though it is not positioning itself as a training platform. The test now covers nine sports, and NTangible also offers a workplace variant, NTerpret, aimed at HR departments. Its likeliest business model is selling to organisations rather than individuals; the company was set to detail its strategy at TechCrunch Disrupt, where it was among the top 20 Startup Battlefield finalists.