ALLIANCE FASTPITCH BLOG

Close to 20,000 fastpitch athletes will earn a validated cognitive performance score every year, expanding on NTangible’s current partnership as the Mental Performance Partner.

NTangible, the cognitive performance analytics company behind the Clutch Factor, is expanding its existing partnership with Alliance Fastpitch, the largest youth softball organization in America. Under the expanded agreement, close to 20,000 athletes age thirteen and up will be assessed annually, embedding a standardized mental performance score directly into Alliance’s player development infrastructure. The expansion makes this the largest single mental performance data initiative in youth sports history. For the first time, an entire generation of fastpitch players will graduate into the recruiting market with comparable, portable, validated data on the part of their game everyone has always evaluated and no one has ever measured.

“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 General Manager of the AUSL Cascade. “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. At Alliance, we build complete athletes, not just the measurable ones.”

“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.”

The Clutch Factor is scored on a 1,000-point scale and completed in roughly fifteen minutes on any device. The same way the SAT gave college admissions a common language across thousands of high schools, it gives recruiters and coaches a common language across every gym, diamond, and showcase field in the country. Two Alliance athletes show 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 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 value in the platform, calling the mental scouting report “a blueprint to maximize my potential before stepping on campus.” Two athletes, two profiles, two paths to development, all sitting on top of the same comparable score that a college coach can pull up from any laptop in the country before deciding whether to spend a scholarship. On a Tuesday at eleven at night, a head coach back from a third showcase weekend pulls up a list of forty names. Their physical numbers are already cleaned and ranked. With the expanded Alliance partnership, their Clutch Factor scores are right next to them. The part of the evaluation that used to live inside the staff’s breakfast argument now lives in a column on the same sheet.

The methodology behind the Clutch Factor draws on decades of research in industrial-organizational psychology. NTangible’s scientific team includes Dr. Ed Levine, one of the most cited figures in the field; 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 seventy-three percent of athletes scoring above 800 go on to earn All-Conference or All-American recognition, and those above 750 are roughly twice as likely to commit to a Division I program. That is the difference between a self-report inventory and a validated measurement. Coaches who have never had reliable numbers on this side of the game now have one that has been studied, tested, and shown to predict what they have always cared about.

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. A failed Division I transfer still costs a program roughly $150,000, and that bill is paid almost entirely on instinct. When the largest organization in a sport embeds mental performance data into its standard evaluation process at this scale, the question changes for everyone else. It stops being whether this should be measured and starts being whether you can afford to be the program that isn’t.

Expanded assessments through the Alliance Fastpitch partnership begin this season. To learn more or explore early access, visit ntangible.co.

About NTangible

Founded by former collegiate baseball player Dan Connerty, NTangible is a cognitive performance analytics company that quantifies the mental traits that drive elite performance. The platform produces two outputs from a single 15-minute assessment: the Clutch Factor™, a 1,000-point pressure performance score, and NTerpret™, a mental scouting report for coaching and development. The methodology is built on decades of peer-reviewed research in industrial-organizational psychology, led by Chief Science Advisor Dr. Ed Levine (PhD, Professor Emeritus, USF), Director of Science Dr. Jon Levine (PhD, NCSU, creator of Monster.com’s original job-matching algorithm), and Executive Advisor Howie Schwartz (30-year Olympic and professional sports psychologist). NTangible operates across seven sports, with 5,000+ assessments delivered across 40+ collegiate programs, professional environments including RFK Racing’s NASCAR pit crew operation, and youth development organizations including Alliance Fastpitch, the Future Stars Series, High Level Throwing, DARTLE, and Governors Challenge. Headquartered in Toronto with a presence at Chicago’s 1871 Innovation Lab and the MaRS Accelerator. Learn more at ntangible.co.

About The Alliance Fastpitch

Launched in 2020, The Alliance Fastpitch is a national league organization built to unite the fastpitch softball community and drive player-centric programming across the country. Nine regional leagues span all 50 states, hosting more than 15,000 members each season, including travel softball athletes, coaches, and parents. The organization runs flagship championship events including the Alliance Fastpitch Championship Series and Alliance Fastpitch Open Nationals, alongside year-round member benefits, college recruiting resources, and player development pathways. Led by CEO Jami Lobpries, who also serves as General Manager of the AUSL Cascade, The Alliance Fastpitch is the largest youth softball organization in the United States. Learn more at thealliancefastpitch.com.

Media Contact

Dan Connerty, Founder and CEO, NTangible | [email protected]