NTangible Named Official Mental Performance Partner of Alliance Fastpitch

NTangible, the cognitive performance analytics company behind the Clutch Factor assessment, has been named the Official Mental Performance Partner of Alliance Fastpitch, the largest youth softball organization in America. Close to 30,000 athletes, age thirteen and up, will be assessed annually through the partnership, embedding a standardized mental performance score directly into Alliance’s player development infrastructure.

“What excites me most about this is simple – we’re giving athletes a clearer picture of who they are as competitors,” said Jami Lobpries, CEO of Alliance Fastpitch and GM of the AUSL Cascade.  “In youth sports, we’ve spent years indexing various physical tools, while the mental side – how you handle pressure, adversity, and big moments – has been left to opinion. This partnership allows us to bring real structure and visibility to that part of development. At Alliance, everything we do is about building better athletes, and that means developing the complete player, not just the measurable tools.”

“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. “But there has never been a standardized, validated, comparable way to measure it. A coach at Michigan State and a coach at Hofstra are both assessing mental makeup, and neither one is assessing the same thing. The Alliance partnership changes that. For the first time, close to 30,000 young athletes will have a cognitive performance score that travels with them through the recruiting process.”

For decades, a coach’s assessment of an athlete’s mental makeup has been exactly that: one coach’s assessment. Subjective, inconsistent, and impossible to compare across programs, levels, or sports. The Clutch Factor changes the unit of measurement. Scored on a 1,000-point scale and completed in roughly 15 minutes on any device, it gives every athlete a single, portable number that measures how they perform under pressure, process adversity, and compete when the stakes are real. The same way the SAT gave college admissions a common language across thousands of high schools, the Clutch Factor gives recruiters and coaches a common language across every gym, diamond, and showcase field in the country.

Two Alliance athletes demonstrate what that looks like in practice. Hannah Wells, the 2025 Gatorade National Player of the Year and University of Texas commit, said: “Understanding my Clutch Factor helped me elevate my game when the pressure was highest.” Kai Minor, the number one ranked outfield recruit in the 2025 graduate class and University of Oklahoma commit, found a different kind of value in the platform. “The mental scouting report gave me a blueprint to maximize my potential before stepping on campus.”

The platform’s methodology draws on decades of research in industrial-organizational psychology. NTangible’s scientific team includes Dr. Ed Levine, one of the most cited figures in U.S. industrial-organizational psychology; Dr. Jon Levine, who built the original job-matching algorithm for Monster.com; and Howie Schwartz, a thirty-year sports psychologist whose career spans Olympic and professional organizations. Internal data shows that 73 percent of athletes scoring above 800 on the Clutch Factor go on to earn All-American recognition, and athletes above 750 are approximately twice as likely to compete at the Division I level.

NTangible works with more than 40 NCAA programs, including Boston College, Florida Atlantic, Richmond, and Hofstra, and recently announced a partnership with RFK Racing, where the platform is used to evaluate pit crew performance in an environment where composure and split-second decision-making directly affect safety and race outcomes. NTangible currently operates across seven sports and expects to expand to more than twenty by the end of 2026.

The physical side of player evaluation has matured. Every serious program has the same wearables, the same film tools, the same speed and strength metrics. When everyone has the same information, none of it is a competitive advantage anymore. The cost of getting the mental side wrong, by contrast, is concrete. A failed NCAA Division I transfer costs a program roughly $150,000. A first-round draft bust at the professional level averages $3.5 million in sunk value. Those are the economics of decisions that have always been made on instinct.

When the largest organization in a sport embeds mental performance data into its standard evaluation process, the question changes for everyone else. It stops being whether this should be measured and becomes whether you can afford to be the program that isn’t.

If you are interested in getting an edge for your athletes or program, reach out to learn more or visit ntangible.co.