Quantifying the Unquantifiable: Startup NTangible Aims to Predict Athletic ‘Clutch’ Performance Under Pressure

When collegiate sports programs scour the nation to recruit top-tier athletic talent, evaluating physical capabilities is a well-established, highly scientific process. Coaches and scouts can measure concrete metrics with pinpoint accuracy: a player’s sprint speed, throwing velocity, vertical leap, and overall physical strength can all be quantified down to the decimal. Yet, despite the billions of dollars flowing through collegiate sports, an invisible barrier has long persisted in talent evaluation. There has never been a clear, standardized way to measure the mental side of sports—specifically, how a prospective athlete will actually perform when thrust into high-pressure situations.

Will a player stay calm, maintain razor-sharp focus, and execute under the blinding lights of a championship game? Or will they panic in the spotlight, freeze, and falter when their team needs them the most?

Dan Connerty, co-founder and CEO of sports-tech startup NTangible, believes he has finally unlocked the secret to answering this age-old question. A former professional baseball player turned entrepreneur, Connerty has set out to bring scientific rigor to what has traditionally been considered an elusive human trait.

“We really wanted to hyper-focus on this idea of clutch performance,” Connerty told TechCrunch, reflecting on the motivations behind launching the company. “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.”

To crack open that black box, Connerty partnered with Dr. Ed Levine, a prominent psychologist and professor emeritus at the University of South Florida. Together, they developed a specialized psychological assessment designed to predict an athlete’s likelihood of thriving under pressure. Dubbed the Clutch Factor assessment, the tool draws clear inspiration from the Thematic Apperception Test—a classic psychological examination in which individuals are presented with photographs of ambiguous situations. Test-takers are asked to describe what they see unfolding, identify who they imagine themselves to be within the scene, and narrate what they believe will happen next.

Rather than relying on multiple-choice questions about sports scenarios, the NTangible assessment engages the mind in a similar projective manner.

“There’s no right or wrong answers,” Connerty explained. “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.”

The resulting score places the athlete on a scale between 0 and 1000. According to Connerty, the predictive capabilities of the test are striking; an athlete who achieves a score exceeding 750 is statistically twice as likely to commit to a prestigious NCAA Division I athletic program.

“What we’ve been able to do is leverage this analysis, where we can show the predictive ability,” he said, emphasizing how the metric could reshape modern sports management. “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.”

Despite the enthusiasm surrounding the technology, a potential vulnerability exists within the product’s current framework. Because the assessment relies on linguistic choices and open-ended text responses, ambitious athletes seeking to impress college coaches and recruiters could theoretically attempt to game the system by answering dishonestly to artificially inflate their score.

A firsthand test of the platform highlights this dynamic. When taking the quiz with complete honesty, a user might receive a below-average score—reflecting a personal history of dreading high-leverage situations during high school sports. However, when taking the assessment a second time while consciously adopting the persona of a level-headed, hyper-focused top recruit, that same user’s score can jump dramatically, illustrating how motivated respondents might influence the algorithmic output.

To combat these limitations and maximize utility, the platform may ultimately function best not merely as a gatekeeping filter, but as a developmental tool for coaches to identify athletes’ mental vulnerabilities and help them improve. Connerty maintains that “clutch” behavior is fundamentally a trainable skill. While NTangible does not position itself primarily as a training platform, Connerty collaborated with former Major League Baseball sports psychologist Howie Schwartz to curate a specialized list of exercises. These routines are designed to serve as a practical starting point for athletes looking to fortify their mental resilience.

While Connerty’s professional roots are firmly planted in baseball, NTangible has already expanded its testing framework to support nine different sports. Furthermore, the company harbors ambitions well beyond the realm of athletics, seeking to adapt the underlying assessment for corporate environments. By migrating the technology to human resources departments, NTangible aims to help companies evaluate employees’ strengths and weaknesses under occupational pressure.

To address the corporate market, the company developed the NTerpret assessment, which translates psychological evaluation more directly to the workplace. In this version, respondents answer targeted questions regarding how they best respond to professional coaching and feedback, offering management valuable data on how an individual employee processes complex instructions and acts upon critical information under stress.

As NTangible scales its operations, the startup’s most commercially viable business model appears to be selling its software solutions directly to organized sports entities, universities, and corporate enterprises rather than marketing to individual consumers. The company is poised to elaborate further on its comprehensive business strategy on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt, where it is currently competing among the top 20 emerging companies vying for the grand prize at the Startup Battlefield competition.

The event highlights the growing intersection of advanced technology and human performance, drawing investors and industry leaders to downtown San Francisco to evaluate the next wave of high-impact startups.