Sport PSYENCE applies 25+ years of embeddedness research to college athletic decisions. The AEP™ helps families make the right commitment the first time. The PED™ helps programs hold the roster before the portal opens. Pick the one that matches your side.
Both rest on the four structural conditions (Sacrifice, Fit, Links, Promise Integrity) that 25+ years of research links to whether someone stays, performs, and gets value out of the situation they chose. The instrument changes based on who is in the room.
You are evaluating a decision that will shape an entire college career. The AEP™ is a preference-based decision support instrument that surfaces what your athlete actually values, what you each weight as a parent, and the structurally diagnostic questions every program in front of you has to answer.
You own the roster. The PED™ is an organizational diagnostic that measures structural attachment by sport, position group, and class year, then translates the result into the specific moves your staff makes next. Built to sit alongside your existing engagement instruments and make them sharper.
Applied to athletics, PSYENCE® identifies where the decisions made by athletes, parents, coaches, and programs diverge from the outcomes everyone says they want, then engineers the structural conditions that make staying, performing, and keeping promises the natural result.
One body of science. Two instruments. The AEP™ for the people in your house. The PED™ for the staff that owns the roster.
Mitchell, Lee, and Holtom (2001) established the first three across 250+ peer reviewed studies and 111,000+ participants. The fourth is grounded in Denise Rousseau's psychological contract research and extended by Dr. Dannehl based on 30 years of applied experience and current conditions in athletics and corporate.
What the athlete puts on the line by committing — and what would become hardest to walk away from later. For a high schooler picking a program, it shows up as opportunity cost across every other offer. For a JUCO athlete transferring up, it shows up as the ground already built. Same question, different starting point.
Alignment between the athlete and the program, coach, team, scheme, and environment. Fit is what most assessments think they measure. They do not.
Teammate bonds, coaching relationships, advisors, community ties, family proximity. Coaching changes can destroy Links overnight.
Were the commitments made during recruiting delivered? Playing time, coaching style, NIL follow-through, academic support. The first construct built to measure whether the deal got kept.
Premium positioning gets diluted when nobody knows what is in the room and what is not.
We do not negotiate NIL deals, place athletes, or represent anyone in a transaction.
We do not market athletes, manage exposure, or curate program lists.
The AEP™ does not pick a school. The PED™ does not score athletes. Both surface structural data the staff or family acts on.
Not Myers-Briggs. Not DISC. Structural attachment instruments grounded in 25+ years of research.
The family pays us on the AEP™. The program pays us on the PED™. No commissions. Ever.
The AEP™ and PED™ are decision support tools, not clinical assessments. Clinical concerns trigger pause and referral.
We have no financial interest in where any athlete commits, or in any roster decision. Our incentive is clarity. Full stop.
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 →The AEP™ for parents and athletes navigating a commitment decision.
The PED™ for coaches, ADs, and senior staff managing roster retention.
Start a 20-minute conversation. We listen, you talk, and we figure out together whether the situation in front of you needs the AEP™, the PED™, or neither.
