NTangible and Alliance Fastpitch are embedding a standardized cognitive performance score into the recruiting pipeline for nearly 20,000 athletes. For college coaches, that changes everything.
Every college softball coach has a version of the same conversation. It happens at the end of a long showcase weekend, somewhere between the third meal of the day and the flight home. The names on the whiteboard are sorted by exit velocity, arm strength, and GPA. Then someone says: "But can she handle pressure?" And the room goes quiet, because that question has never had a clean answer.
It may now. NTangible, the cognitive analytics company behind the Clutch Factor assessment, has expanded its existing partnership with Alliance Fastpitch — the largest youth softball organization in the country — to assess close to 20,000 athletes annually. Starting this season, every Alliance participant age 13 and up will earn a validated cognitive performance score that travels with her through the recruiting process.
It is, by any measure, the largest mental performance data initiative in youth sports history.
A standardized score for the part of evaluation that has never been standardized
The Clutch Factor is scored on a 1,000-point scale and takes roughly 15 minutes on any device. The methodology draws on decades of industrial-organizational psychology, developed by a scientific team that includes Dr. Ed Levine, one of the most cited researchers in the field; Dr. Jon Levine, who built the original job-matching algorithm for Monster.com; and Howie Schwartz, a sports psychologist with 30 years of work across Olympic and professional organizations.
"Every coach in every sport says they evaluate mental toughness and the ability to perform under pressure," said Dan Connerty, founder and CEO of NTangible. "There has never been a standardized, validated, comparable way to measure it. A coach at Hofstra and a coach at Boston College are both assessing mental makeup, and neither one is assessing the same thing. Expanding the Alliance partnership to this scale changes that. Close to 20,000 young athletes will now have a cognitive performance score that travels with them through the recruiting process, the same way a transcript does."
73%of athletes scoring above 800 earn All-Conference or All-American honors
2×more likely to commit to a Division I program if scoring above 750
~15 minto complete on any device, scored on a 1,000-point scale
What it looks like from the other side of the desk
Picture a Tuesday night, 11 p.m. A head coach back from her third showcase weekend in four weeks opens a spreadsheet. The physical metrics are already cleaned and ranked. Under the expanded Alliance partnership, each athlete's Clutch Factor score sits in the next column. The conversation that used to happen over breakfast — "I think she's a competitor, I'm not sure she can handle our environment" — now has a number next to it.
Two Alliance athletes illustrate what that looks like in practice. Hannah Wells, the 2025 Gatorade National Player of the Year and University of Texas commit, said understanding her Clutch Factor helped her perform when the pressure was at its highest. Kai Minor, the top-ranked outfield recruit in the 2025 class and University of Oklahoma commit, used hers differently — treating the resulting mental scouting report as a development blueprint before she ever stepped on campus.
Two athletes. Two profiles. Two paths. One comparable score that any coaching staff can pull up from any laptop before deciding whether to commit scholarship money.
"We're giving athletes a clearer picture of who they are as competitors. Youth sports has spent years indexing physical tools while the mental side — how a player handles pressure, adversity, and big moments — has been left to opinion. This brings real structure and visibility to that part of development."— Jami Lobpries, CEO of Alliance Fastpitch and GM of the AUSL Cascade
The cost of guessing wrong is well-documented
The physical side of player evaluation has matured. Wearables, film tools, and speed and strength metrics are table stakes at any serious program. And yet a failed Division I transfer still costs a program an estimated $150,000 — a bill paid almost entirely on instinct about the mental side of a prospect.
When the largest organization in the sport embeds mental performance data into its standard evaluation process at this scale, the question shifts for every other program. It stops being whether this should be measured. It starts being whether a staff can afford to be the one that isn't measuring it.
Expanded assessments through the Alliance Fastpitch partnership begin this season.
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