The PED™ is an organizational diagnostic, not a personality assessment. It measures the structural forces holding athletes in place by sport, position group, and class year, and shows you which one is letting go. Deployed in 30 days. Heat map on Day 25. R³ Executive Readout with you and your senior staff on Day 30. Acted on by week six.
Over 10,500 college football players entered the transfer portal in the January 2026 window alone. Men's basketball loses starters mid-season. Women's programs rebuild rosters annually. The response across the industry has been predictable: more NIL money, better facilities, bigger promises. The departures keep coming.
Your engagement survey tells you how athletes feel at a point in time. That data is real. It was never designed to measure structural attachment. By the time the survey or the exit interview catches a problem, the structural erosion that caused it has been underway for months. Often the entire prior season.
Money, buildings, and pitches were never the forces holding athletes in place. The forces are Sacrifice, Fit, Links, and Promise Integrity. Programs spending millions on the visible layers are leaving the structural layer unmeasured.
Athletes who quietly detach but never leave. Athletes whose Links dimension collapses when a position coach takes another job. Athletes whose Promise Integrity score craters six weeks after a recruiting visit. None of it surfaces on the engagement instrument.
Athletic departments have been sold every flavor of survey, assessment, and consulting product. Here is exactly what is not in the room when you engage Sport PSYENCE on the program side.
Engagement measures sentiment. The PED™ measures the structural conditions that determine whether engagement converts to retained, performing athletes.
Not Myers-Briggs. Not DISC. Not a tendencies profile. An organizational diagnostic that scores structural attachment.
Explicitly separate from Title IX screenings, NCAA compliance exercises, and mental health assessments. Athletes know what checkbox exercises feel like.
Coaches see team and group level scores. Individual responses never reach coaching staff. The instrument fails the moment athletes do not believe that.
The PED™ sits alongside your engagement instruments, exit interviews, and roster surveys. It adds the structural layer the others were not built to provide.
The PED™ is a decision support tool, not a clinical assessment. If clinical concerns surface in administration, we pause and refer.
We have no financial interest in any roster decision or any individual athlete's commitment status. Our incentive is structural intelligence the staff can act on.
A 36-item diagnostic deployed to the roster, scored against locked thresholds, reported as a heat map by sport, position group, class year, or tenure cohort. The R³ Executive Readout translates the diagnostic into the moves your staff makes in the next 30, 60, and 90 days. Designed to make every other instrument you already run sharper, not redundant.
The PED™ measures the four structural conditions: Sacrifice, Fit, Links, and Promise Integrity. Locked scoring bands at 85+ Deeply Embedded, 70 to 84 Conditionally Embedded, 55 to 69 At Risk, and under 55 Flight Risk, per PSYENCE® Scoring Methodology v3.0.
The output is a structural intelligence report branded to your program. Composite score on top. Dimension breakdown beneath. Subset cuts by the groupings that actually matter to roster management: sport, position group, class year, tenure cohort. Each cut reveals which dimension is driving the gap for that group, and where the next intervention has to land.
Three phases. Diagnose. Prioritize. Execute. The R³ Executive Readout is a 90-minute working session with the head coach, AD, and senior staff. Every engagement includes it. Higher tier engagements extend the work into ongoing advisory across the season, pre-portal preparation, and roster re-architecture between cycles.
Illustrative program-level PED™ output. Composite score on top. Dimension breakdown beneath. Subset table for the groupings that drive action.
The roster is holding for now. The composite places this program in the Conditionally Embedded band: real structural attachment, real strain underneath, one coaching change or one broken promise away from movement.
The four dimension scores below show where the strain is concentrated. The subset table after that shows which sports and class years are carrying it.
Conditionally EmbeddedSame composite, decomposed by sport and class year. This is where the staff decides which rooms to walk into first.
| Subset | n | Composite | Driving Dimension | Risk Band |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Football · Trenches | 22 | 88 | Links holding strong | Deeply Embedded |
| Football · Skill | 18 | 71 | Promise Integrity strained | Conditionally Embedded |
| M Basketball | 13 | 58 | Promise Integrity (NIL) | At Risk |
| W Basketball | 14 | 76 | Fit anchored | Conditionally Embedded |
| Sophomore Cohort · All Sports | 31 | 52 | Promise Integrity collapse | Flight Risk |
The instrument is only as good as the trust behind it. Athletes have to believe three things before they answer honestly, and the staff has to honor all three for the next administration to work.
Individual athlete responses are never reported to coaching staff. Coaches see team-level averages and dimension scores. They never see what a specific athlete said.
Athletes complete the diagnostic in Week 1. By Week 3, the coaching staff makes at least one visible change based on the results. The change does not have to be massive. It has to be visible.
The PED™ is positioned explicitly as separate from university-mandated surveys, Title IX screenings, mental health assessments, and NCAA compliance exercises. Athletes know what checkbox exercises feel like.
From kickoff conversation to the moves your staff makes next.
20 to 45 minutes with head coach and AD. Roster size. Reporting units you want cut. The questions you're actually trying to answer.
Week 1. 36 items per athlete. Administered by Sport PSYENCE. Anonymous from minute one.
PSYENCE® Scoring Methodology v3.0. Composite, dimension, and subset scoring with minimum cell size enforced.
Day 25. Branded to your program. Composite + dimensions + subsets + driving dimension calls per group.
Day 30. 90 minutes with the head coach, AD, and senior staff. The diagnostic translated into the next 30, 60, and 90 day moves.
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.
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 is a 36-item organizational diagnostic measuring four dimensions of structural attachment: Sacrifice, Fit, Links, and Promise Integrity. The output is a composite score, four dimension scores, and subset cuts by sport, position group, class year, or tenure cohort. Scoring bands are locked at 85+ Deeply Embedded, 70 to 84 Conditionally Embedded, 55 to 69 At Risk, under 55 Flight Risk.
Engagement surveys measure sentiment: how athletes feel at a point in time. That data is real. It was not designed to measure structural attachment. Two athletes with identical engagement scores can have radically different structural profiles. One stays. The other leaves on a Tuesday.
The PED™ does not replace your engagement instrument. It adds the structural measurement your engagement platform was never built to provide and tells you which dimension is driving the gap.
No. Ever. Coaches see team-level averages and dimension scores, never individual answers. The minimum reporting unit is 10 respondents. The diagnostic is administered by Sport PSYENCE, not by coaching staff. Raw data is held by us and never transferred to the institution. Anonymity is the product. The data is only as good as the trust behind it.
30 days from kickoff to R³ Executive Readout. Roster completes the instrument in Week 1. Scoring and report development run Weeks 2 and 3. Report delivered Day 25. Live readout Day 30. The two-week feedback commitment then requires at least one visible change from staff by Week 3 of post-readout work.
Every engagement starts with the R³ Executive Readout: deployment, the Structural Retention Intelligence Report branded to your program, and the live readout, delivered in 30 days. Higher tier engagements extend into ongoing advisory across the season, pre-portal preparation, and roster re-architecture between cycles. Scoping happens in the first 20-minute conversation.
Promise Integrity measures whether commitments made during recruiting were actually delivered. Playing time. Coaching style. NIL follow-through. Academic support. Position group plans. Grounded in Rousseau (1989) psychological contract theory and 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.
Sacrifice, Fit, and Links 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: 20 minutes. Operator to operator. We learn the roster, the questions you are trying to answer, and what would need to be true for the diagnostic to be worth deploying.
