VAC Pilot Brief
KNWN.TO — Spring 2026
Powered by Mettle
Most mental performance programs create work for coaches.
This one runs itself.
KNWN.TO — readiness infrastructure for competitive teams. Powered by Mettle.
Coaches make decisions about athletes they can't fully see.
Not because they aren't paying attention. Because readiness isn't visible. Performance shows up in film. Readiness lives underneath it: who's carrying something, who's running on empty, who's primed and nobody knows it yet. Most coaches spend the first four to six weeks of a season building that picture from observation alone. By the time it's clear, a third of the season is gone.
First Read closes that window before the season opens.
What This Is
The Pilot
A two-phase pilot of KNWN's VAC (Virtual Assistant Coach), running the full assessment-to-insight loop with a real roster.
VAC — the Virtual Assistant Coach — is the system running behind the picture you'll receive. Its athlete-facing embodiment is LaRue: an AI agent that works like an assistant coach, reading each athlete, adjusting as needed, and getting the job done without pulling you into the process.
No simulations. No sample data. Your athletes, your team.
What LaRue Handles
LaRue handles outreach, follow-up, and completion tracking. It runs whether or not anyone has bandwidth. You don't manage any of it — you just get the picture.
Coaches running full staffs and coaches running solo programs get the same output. The system doesn't care how stretched you are.
Phase 1 — The Baseline (Weeks 1–2)
The goal is a complete psychological readiness profile on every athlete before the season makes decisions for you.
Here's how it works.
01
You upload your roster.
A Google Sheet or CSV with athlete names and contact information. LaRue uses that file to populate your team and kick off athlete onboarding automatically.
02
LaRue contacts your athletes.
LaRue contacts each athlete directly, routes the assessment, and owns completion. If an athlete hasn't responded, LaRue follows up. If they need a nudge, LaRue gives one. Athletes complete the 12-minute psychological readiness assessment on their own time, on their phones. You don't touch it.
03
You see your team.
Once athletes complete First Read, the picture assembles itself. You get a complete readiness view of your roster — before the first week of competition, without waiting weeks to piece it together from observation alone.
What you get to make it actionable:
A coaching brief for every athlete on your roster
Not scores. Not a personality type. For each athlete: how to deliver feedback, how they respond when the stakes rise, and how quickly they recover from mistakes. Written in plain language, ready before your first practice.
A team-level summary
Pattern-level insight across your roster. What's showing up, and what it means for how you run practice and manage the season.
An AI chat interface
Ask questions about your team or individual athletes and get answers grounded in their actual assessment data. The context you'd otherwise piece together across weeks of observation is already there.
The average coach walks into preseason with intuition. You'll walk in with a picture.
What your team picture looks like
Coaching Brief
Roster View
Phase 2 — Ongoing Readiness (Weeks 3–4)
Beyond the Snapshot
Phase 1 gives you a picture. Phase 2 keeps it moving.
Phase 2 extends this into ongoing readiness tracking — periodic check-ins that update the picture with the season instead of freezing it at preseason. We'll map out the specifics after you've seen Phase 1 results.
A Verifiable Outcome Record
What you're measuring isn't a feeling. It's movement. At the end of a season, you'll know which athletes moved, when they moved, and what preceded it. That's not a sense that things improved. That's a record.
The Science Behind First Read
First Read runs on a proprietary layer built on top of the ACSI-28 — the primary assessment instrument in sport psychology research for the past 30 years, validated across thousands of athletes in peer-reviewed literature.
Dr. Alex Auerbach, Mettle's co-founder and Chief Science Officer, has used it as his primary clinical tool throughout a fifteen-year career spanning NBA and NFL organizations, college football, Fortune 500 performance coaching, and work with US military personnel. He currently serves as Performance Psychologist for the Jacksonville Jaguars.
The established science is public and 30 years deep. The sport-specific norms, the readiness framework, and the clinical methodology built on top of it — that's First Read.
What You're Committing To
Roster Upload
Upload a roster of 10–25 athletes via Google Sheet or CSV
Kickoff Call
One kickoff call (20 minutes) before we launch
Debrief Call
One debrief call (30 minutes) after Phase 1 completes
KNWN's delivery layer handles all athlete outreach. Your time commitment is two calls and a dashboard review — nothing else.
Cost: Free for pilot participants.
What we ask in return: honest feedback on what the picture tells you and whether it changes how you coach.
Who This Is For
We're looking for coaches who are already curious about what's happening under the surface with their athletes — and want a faster, more systematic way to see it.
The coaches who get the most from this pilot aren't the ones who think mental performance is a missing piece. They're the ones who already know it matters and are tired of not having a reliable way to act on it.
If you've ever watched an athlete underperform and known it wasn't about skill — this is what you've been missing.
Ready to Run It?
The Kickoff Call
Twenty minutes. By the end of it you'll know what your athletes experience, what you get back, and whether it fits your season. No obligation after that.
Reach out directly: robert@knwn.to
Limited Spots Available
Spots are limited. We're accepting pilot coaches on a rolling basis this spring.
About KNWN.TO
KNWN.TO is readiness infrastructure for competitive athletes and the coaches who develop them. Not a tool coaches manage — a system that runs itself.
Powered by Mettle — built with Dr. Alex Auerbach, Co-Founder, Chief Science Officer, and Performance Psychologist for the Jacksonville Jaguars.