You sit at the center of a decision the loudest voices in the room are trying to make for you. A college offer is not just a roster spot. It is a coach, a role, a money picture, an academic path, a life away from home, and a stack of promises that may or may not hold. The AEP™ does not pick the school. It surfaces what your athlete actually values, where you and your athlete line up or quietly collide, and the exact 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: does this program actually fit your athlete, or does it just feel right in the room?
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.
It is new, and you should know exactly what is and is not in the room when a family brings in Sport PSYENCE.
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. It measures what would actually keep your athlete at a program, grounded in 25+ years of research.
The family is the only party paying us. No commissions. No referral fees. Ever.
A decision tool, not a clinical assessment. If a clinical concern surfaces while we work with your family, 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 answer privately, the athlete in about 15 minutes. You get back your Alignment Profile, your Discovery Question Bank, and a 90-minute family debrief with Dr. Dannehl. The same tool works at the first commitment, at a transfer decision, at an NIL call, and at the stay or turn pro decision when it comes.
It comes down to four questions every family is already trying to answer, across athletics, academics, money, and life beyond the sport:
What does my athlete gain, and give up, by choosing this program? Does the role, the level, the staff, the school, and the life around it actually fit? Who will anchor my athlete when the season gets hard? And the one nobody verifies: what has been promised, and how do we know it will hold?
That last one is Promise Integrity: the playing time, the role, the NIL, the development plan, the academic support. The athlete answers privately. The parent answers separately. The AEP™ shows you where you agree, where you quietly do not, and the exact questions to put to every coach, agent, AD, and NIL partner before anyone signs.
Your results are yours. No coach, club, school, agent, or collective sees them unless you choose to share. If someone referred you, they do not get your report.
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.
Where you are in the timeline, the offers on the table, the voices in the room. No agenda.
Privately and separately. No coaches involved. Both finish before we schedule the debrief, so the map is built on complete answers. The parent can opt out at the start if that is the right call for your family.
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, computed on the actual scoring math. Rows are the four life domains. Columns are the four structural forces. Each cell shows the athlete weight (A) and the family weight (P) on a 0 to 100 scale, shaded by the size of the gap.
Dr. Dannehl's applied sport work began in 1997, when he contributed to the coaches and players psychology handbooks 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 also contributed to the 9 C's of a Champion, an assessment of elite athlete characteristics developed with the Blues' performance coach.
His doctoral research extended the science with a fourth force, Promise Integrity, built for an era of explicit, dollar driven recruiting promises. That work 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 way for families to pressure test a college decision before they sign. The athlete answers privately. The parent answers separately. You get back your Alignment Profile, your Discovery Question Bank, and a 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 have to finish before we schedule the debrief, so the map is built on complete answers. If one of you stalls, we reach out and help you across the line.
We set the pace at the first call, around your athlete's real decision timeline, faster if you are staring at an expiring offer. If the parent decides the Parent Perspective is not the right fit, the opt out is there (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 forces 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.
No. If a coach, club, school, advisor, or recruiting service pointed you to us, they do not receive your Alignment Profile or anything from it. Your family controls what gets shared, with whom, and when. The referral gets you in the door. The results stay yours.
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 is whether what was promised in recruiting actually gets delivered. Playing time, role, coaching style, NIL follow through, academic support. It is grounded in research on whether commitments made are kept or broken (Rousseau, 1989; Zhao et al., 2007), where broken promises track with people leaving. Dr. Dannehl added it as the fourth force for the NIL era, when recruiting promises became explicit and dollar driven. It is the newest of the four and the one built for how athletes are recruited now.
The AEP™ is offered at a few levels, from a focused read of your results, to a full debrief with Dr. Dannehl, to ongoing advisory through the decision and what comes after. We help you pick the right level, and scope the pricing, in the first 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 research on kept versus broken commitments (Rousseau, 1989; Zhao et al., 2007), extended by Dr. Dannehl into a fourth embeddedness dimension.
Exposure gets your athletes seen. The AEP™ helps their families decide what to do once the offers come in. It helps your athletes ask better questions, compare programs honestly, and avoid the bad fit that turns into a transfer, which protects your name as a program that places people well.
Families control their own results. You do not see their report unless they choose to share it. The referral gets the credit. The decision stays theirs.
Talk Referral Partnership →A first call 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.
