You are the parent. You are the athlete. Either way, you sit at the center of a decision the loudest voices in the room are trying to make for you. The AEP™ is a preference-based decision support instrument grounded in 25+ years of embeddedness research. It does not pick the school. It surfaces what your athlete actually values, what you each weight as a parent, and the structurally diagnostic questions every coach, agent, AD, and NIL partner has to answer before you sign.
You are evaluating a decision that will shape an entire college career. The head coach pulls toward one school. The personal coach likes another. The NIL advisor pushes a third. Friends, teammates, agents, social media, well-meaning family. Every voice has an agenda. Few of them are objective.
You have already invested years and tens of thousands of dollars getting your athlete to the moment offers are on the table. The market spends a fortune at this step: recruiting services, skill coaches, sport psychology support, transfer advisors, NIL consultants. None of those structures the conversation that actually decides whether the commitment gets made on signal or on noise.
The one question nobody answers for you: which of the things that hold your athlete in place are still doing the work, and which one is about to let go?
Athletes are making the biggest decision of their athletic career in the middle of this. When they pick wrong, they transfer. When they transfer, most do not improve their situation. Many move down a level.
Premium positioning gets diluted when nobody knows what is in the room and what is not. Here is exactly what is not in the room when you engage Sport PSYENCE on the family side.
We do not negotiate NIL deals, place athletes, or represent anyone in a transaction.
We do not market your athlete, manage exposure, or curate program lists.
The AEP™ and Parent Perspective Instrument do not pick a school. They surface what each of you values and the questions that test every program in front of you.
Not Myers-Briggs. Not DISC. Not a tendencies profile. A structural attachment instrument grounded in 25+ years of research.
The family is the only party paying us. No commissions. No referral fees. Ever.
The AEP™ is a decision support tool, not a clinical assessment. If clinical concerns surface, we pause and refer to a licensed provider.
We have no financial interest in where your athlete commits. Our incentive is decision clarity. Full stop.
The athlete and the parent each complete a structured assessment privately. The output is your Alignment Profile, your Discovery Question Bank, and a 90-minute family debrief with Dr. Dannehl. The architecture is portable: it serves you at the initial commitment, at any transfer consideration, at NIL decisions, and at the pro-versus-stay decision when it comes.
The athlete completes 96 items privately across the four structural conditions (Sacrifice, Fit, Links, Promise Integrity) and four life domains (Athletics, Academics, Financial, Life Beyond Sport). Roughly 25 to 35 minutes. The parent completes the parallel Parent Perspective Instrument separately.
The output is the Alignment Profile: a 4×4 priority heat map across 16 cells, plus the Discovery Question Bank. The Question Bank converts your athlete's priority architecture into the specific, structurally diagnostic questions to put in front of every coach, agent, administrator, recruiting service, and NIL partner in front of you.
Most of what gets asked during a recruiting visit is generic. These are not. They surface what is in writing versus in conversation, what is contingent versus guaranteed, who actually coaches your athlete day to day, and what happens if any of that changes after you sign.
A structured family engagement, not a survey blast. The athlete's voice ends up in the room even when the room is dominated by adults.
20 minutes. Where you are in the timeline. The offers on the table. The voices in the room. No agenda.
Privately and separately. 96 items for the athlete. Parent Perspective for the parent. No coaches involved. Hard gate: both must finish before the debrief is scheduled. Parent opt-out documented at intake is the only exception.
4×4 heat map across 16 cells. Where athlete and parent align. Where you have blind spots. Where Promise Integrity is the variable.
Your athlete's priority architecture converted into the specific questions to put to coaches, agents, administrators, and NIL partners. Structurally diagnostic. Not generic checklist.
Walk the heat map. Surface the alignment gaps. Name the decision-quality risks. Decide which programs survive the next round of conversation.
This is the artifact families come back to for years. 250+ structurally diagnostic questions mapped to the 4×4 architecture, organized into targeted sets for coaches, agents, administrators, recruiting services, NIL partners, sport psychologists, and personal coaches. Built to surface what recruiting hides.
When reality and recruiting visit diverge later, the Question Bank is the paper trail that surfaces what was promised. That is decision-quality protection no recruiting service produces.
An illustrative Alignment Profile. Rows are the four life domains. Columns are the four structural conditions. Each cell shows where athlete and parent agree, where you diverge in degree, and where the two of you carry an actual gap that needs surfacing before any program visit.
Dr. Dannehl's applied sport work began in 1997 as a co-author on the Coaches Psychology Handbook and Players Psychology Handbook for the St. Louis Rams, working alongside the team's performance coach. His master's capstone built the Performance Enhancement Profile (PEP) in collaboration with the St. Louis Blues sport psychologist, integrating the Profile of Mood States, the Test of Attentional and Interpersonal Style, and an original assessment framework. He partnered with the Blues' performance coach to develop the 9 C's of a Champion, an assessment focused on the characteristics of elite athletes.
His doctoral research extended embeddedness theory into structural retention prediction, confirming that what people sacrifice by leaving predicts retention more powerfully than satisfaction, engagement, or cultural fit. That research became the foundation for the PSYENCE® Embeddedness Diagnostic and the Athletic Embeddedness Profile™.
Co-author: The PSYENCE of Execution: What Golf Reveals About Performing Under Pressure (with Eli Dannehl, 2026) and The PSYENCE of Sales Leadership: From Lagging Leader to Wise Warrior (with William Ely, 2026).
More from Scott on LinkedIn →Looking for the full version with deadlines, single-parent flow, divorced household guidance, demographic optionality, and more? See the complete Family FAQ.
The Athletic Embeddedness Profile™ is a preference-based decision support instrument for families navigating college athletic commitment decisions. The athlete completes 96 items privately across the four structural conditions and four life domains. The parent completes the parallel Parent Perspective Instrument. The output is the Alignment Profile, the Discovery Question Bank, and a 90-minute family debrief with Dr. Dannehl.
It is not a personality test. Not a recruiting service. Not a matching algorithm. It is the structural layer the rest of the recruiting industry does not measure.
Both instruments have to finish before the debrief is scheduled. This is a hard gate in the scoring engine. The engine produces a pending_completion flag for the practitioner, who contacts you. The engagement does not move forward to the debrief without complete data.
Deadlines are set at the engagement scoping call based on your athlete's decision timeline. Two weeks from start is common; faster if you are facing an expiring offer. If the parent decides the Parent Perspective is the wrong fit, the opt-out path is available (see below).
Yes. The athlete-only engagement is fully supported. The Parent Perspective and the Alignment Profile are added value, not required. Tell the practitioner at engagement scoping. The opt-out is documented in your intake and the engine generates an athlete-only heat map.
If you opt out and change your mind later, you can complete the Parent Perspective any time before the debrief. The engine re-runs the scoring and produces the overlay.
One parent or guardian completes the Parent Perspective on behalf of the parental unit. We deliberately do not support multiple parents completing the instrument separately. The alignment math gets ambiguous when two parents diverge on items, and the operational complexity does not produce better insight than a single Parent Perspective completed thoughtfully.
If you and your co-parent want to weigh in together, complete the form together. Talk through items where you disagree. That conversation is itself useful preparation for the debrief. Divorced household, single-parent household, blended household: see the full Family FAQ Who-Completes-What section.
Recruiting services manage exposure. Personality assessments describe tendencies. Motivator tools surface what an athlete claims is important. None of them measure the four structural conditions that 25+ years of embeddedness research links to whether an athlete thrives, stays, and gets value out of a college career.
The AEP™ does not replace those tools. It adds the structural layer they were never built to provide.
No. We are not agents. We do not negotiate NIL deals. We do not place athletes. We earn no fees from schools, collectives, or NIL agreements. The family is the only party paying us. Full stop.
The Question Bank converts your athlete's priority architecture into structurally diagnostic questions for every program, coach, agent, AD, and NIL partner in front of you. Built to surface what recruiting visits hide: what is in writing versus in conversation, what is contingent versus guaranteed, who actually coaches your athlete day to day, and what happens if any of that changes after you sign.
It is also the paper trail. When reality and recruiting visit diverge later, you have a record of what was asked, what was promised, and where the gap opened.
Promise Integrity measures whether what was committed during recruiting was actually delivered. Playing time. Coaching style. NIL follow-through. Academic support. Position group plans. It is grounded in Denise Rousseau's psychological contract theory (1989) and the Zhao et al. (2007) meta-analysis showing breach correlates r = .30 to .36 with turnover intention. Dr. Dannehl extended it into the fourth embeddedness dimension based on 30 years of applied experience and current conditions in athletics and corporate.
The AEP™ is offered in tiered engagements. The standard tier includes both instruments, the Alignment Profile, the Discovery Question Bank, and the 90-minute family debrief. Higher tier engagements extend access to Dr. Dannehl through the full commitment process and any subsequent transfer, NIL, or post-college decisions. Pricing is scoped in the first 20-minute conversation.
Your identifiable data is yours. Individual responses, your Alignment Profile, and any documents we build specifically for your household are family property, governed by the AEP™ Privacy and Data Use Agreement signed at engagement. You can request deletion at any time.
Sport PSYENCE retains the right to use de-identified, aggregated, generalizable data for ongoing research, instrument validation, scoring refinement, benchmarking, and the development of future Sport PSYENCE data products. Nothing leaves your family that can be traced back to a person or a household.
The embeddedness framework has been studied across 250+ peer reviewed studies and 111,000+ participants (Li et al., 2025 meta-analysis). The three original dimensions were established by Mitchell, Lee, and Holtom (2001) and extensively replicated. Promise Integrity is grounded in Rousseau (1989) psychological contract theory and Zhao et al. (2007) meta-analysis, extended by Dr. Dannehl into a fourth embeddedness dimension.
20 minutes to start. No agenda. We listen, you talk, and we figure out together whether the AEP™ is the right fit for your family right now.
