How they feel was never what kept them. What holds an athlete is a handful of things you cannot see on film, and they wear thin long before anyone says a word. The PED™ reads them and shows you where your program is exposed, and which group is at risk, while you can still do something about it.
You watch film on everything they do on the field. None of it tells you whether they still have a reason to be here. By the time the effort dips or word gets back to you, the reasons that kept them have already worn thin, and your shot at fixing it is mostly gone.
Players leave now in numbers that did not exist a few years ago. That is not a coaching failure. The game changed faster than the tools to deal with it.
Phantom Retention™. The roster says retained. The athlete is still in the building, still suiting up, and already halfway out. They count as kept on every report you run while the effort, the leadership, and the buy in have quietly left. You are carrying a player you no longer have, and nothing you track today will show it.
It is new, and anything new that touches the locker room should get a hard look. Here is exactly what it is, and what it is not.
You see scores by group, never by name. No coach ever sees what one athlete said. Nothing is reported for a group smaller than ten.
Built so no one can trace a score to a person, including us. That is the only reason athletes tell the truth on it.
A survey asks how athletes feel. The PED™ reads what would actually keep them. Different question, different answer.
A decision tool, nothing more. If a clinical concern ever surfaces while we run it, we stop and refer.
Separate from mandated surveys, Title IX, and NCAA boxes. Athletes know a checkbox when they see one. This is not one.
It is a self scout. It finds your soft spots so you can shore them up, the way film does before a game.
We are not here to tell your staff how to coach. You already have film for that. The PED™ is built for the part film cannot show, whether the things keeping your roster are holding or quietly slipping.
You would never prep for an opponent without film. Most staffs are trying to manage whether players stay with no film at all on the conditions that decide it. The PED™ is that film. Your current team takes it, anonymously, and it shows you by group where the things that keep players are strong and where the door is open. It is not film on your players. It is film on the conditions around them.
Three of the four, connection, fit, and what a player would give up, have been studied for 25 years across more than 250 studies. They explain whether people stay better than money, satisfaction, or talent.
Promise Integrity™ is the fourth, the one Dr. Dannehl named for the NIL era, because the original model was built before a kid could be sold a six figure promise at the kitchen table. You are early to it. That is the edge, not a footnote.
You get back one group score, the four read out beneath it, and the position rooms and classes carrying the risk, each one telling you which to address and where to start. Then the R3 Executive Readout, a working session with the head coach, GM, AD, and senior staff that turns it into the moves you make next. Run it on one team for a roster read, or across the department for the only program wide picture of its kind in college athletics.
Illustrative output for one program's football roster. One overall score on top, the four forces beneath, then the position rooms and classes that need attention first. One sport, so the picture stays clear.
The room is holding for now. The score puts this football team in the Conditionally Embedded band: real attachment, real strain underneath, one coaching change or one broken promise away from movement.
The four forces below show where the strain sits. The table after that shows which position rooms and classes are carrying it.
Conditionally EmbeddedThe same team, broken out by position room and class. This is where the staff decides which room to walk into first.
| Group | n | Score | What's driving it | Risk Band |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Offensive Line | 17 | 88 | Connection to the program strong | Deeply Embedded |
| Defensive Front | 15 | 79 | High buy-in, what they'd give up | Conditionally Embedded |
| Defensive Backs | 12 | 71 | Role and culture fit holding | Conditionally Embedded |
| Wide Receivers | 13 | 63 | Recruiting promises (NIL) strained | At Risk |
| Freshman Class | 24 | 67 | Ties still forming | At Risk |
| Sophomore Class | 22 | 54 | Recruiting promises broke down | Flight Risk |
The PED™ is only as good as the honesty behind it. Three things make athletes answer straight, and the staff has to hold all three.
Individual answers never reach your staff. Coaches see group scores only, nothing for a group under ten, names never attached.
Sport PSYENCE administers the PED™ and holds the data. Your staff never touches a raw response.
Players see at least one visible change come out of it. It does not have to be big. It has to be seen.
From the first conversation to the moves your staff makes next.
A working call with the head coach, GM, or AD. Your roster, the groups you want broken out, and the questions you want answered.
Each athlete completes the PED™, run by Sport PSYENCE. Anonymous from the first question.
PSYENCE® Scoring Methodology v3.0. An overall score, the four forces, and group scoring, with the minimum group size enforced.
Branded to your program. One overall score, the four forces, the groups that need attention, and what is driving each one.
A working session with the head coach, GM, AD, and senior staff. The findings turned into the moves your staff makes next.
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, the PED™.
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 →The PSYENCE® Embeddedness Diagnostic measures four forces that hold a player to your program: Sacrifice, Fit, Links, and Promise Integrity. You get one overall score, a score for each force, and a breakdown by team, position room, recruiting class, or tenure. Scores fall in locked bands: 85 and up Deeply Embedded, 70 to 84 Conditionally Embedded, 55 to 69 At Risk, under 55 Flight Risk.
Your film, your gut, and whatever roster data you keep all tell you what a player did or how they look right now. They are real, and they are late. By the time they flag a problem, the reasons that kept the player have usually been gone a long while.
The PED™ reads what actually keeps a player before any of that shows up, and tells you which of the four is slipping for which group. It does not replace what you do. It adds the one layer none of it was built to measure.
No. Ever. Coaches see team and group scores, never individual answers. The minimum group reported is 10 responses. The diagnostic is administered by Sport PSYENCE, not your staff. Raw data is held by us and never handed to the institution. Anonymity is the product. The data is only as good as the trust behind it.
Fast enough to act before the next portal window, which is the only clock that matters here. Your team completes the PED™, we score it against the locked bands, you get the Retention Risk Readout, and we sit down for the R³ Executive Readout. We do not put a guaranteed day count on it, because the pace depends on how quickly your roster completes it and when your staff can meet. We move as fast as you do.
Every engagement starts with the R³ Executive Readout: deployment, the Retention Risk Readout branded to your program, and the live working session. Deeper engagements extend into advisory across the season, pre portal preparation, and roster rebuilds between cycles. We scope it in the first conversation.
No tool does, the same way no game plan shuts out every opponent. The PED™ lowers your risk and helps you keep more of the players you want. It is built to improve your odds, not to promise a number.
Promise Integrity measures whether the commitments made during recruiting were actually 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 correlate with turnover intention. 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 other three explain why an athlete stays. Promise Integrity explains why they leave when nothing on paper changed.
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 have been extensively replicated. Promise Integrity is grounded in Rousseau (1989) and Zhao et al. (2007), extended by Dr. Dannehl into the fourth embeddedness dimension.
Individual athlete responses stay with Sport PSYENCE. The program receives team and group level reporting only. Coaches never see individual responses. 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 either side that can be traced back to a person or a program.
The AEP™ is the family-facing instrument: 4×4 priority architecture for decision support, not roster retention.
First conversation, operator to operator. We learn your roster, the questions you want answered, and whether the PED™ is worth running for you.
