Maya is sixteen. She rows for her high school team and her coaches describe her as "tough" and "coachable." What they do not see is that Maya's toughness was forged in a home where unpredictability was the only constant. Her father's drinking meant that any evening could become a crisis. She learned to read a room before she learned to read a book.
On the water, Maya's hypervigilance looks like focus. Her emotional numbness looks like composure. But in the third 500 meters of a race — where the body screams and the mind must choose to stay — Maya's nervous system does what it was trained to do at age seven: it shuts down. Not dramatically. Just enough. Her split times fade by two seconds. Her coach calls it "a fitness issue."
It is not a fitness issue.
60-item assessment mapping adversity history to specific performance and development impact pathways — hypervigilance, emotional numbing, avoidance coping, and attachment disruption — in a non-clinical, coach- and mentor-accessible format.HRV · SLEEP · EDA
The original ACE study (Felitti et al., 1998) surveyed over 17,000 adults and established that adverse childhood experiences — abuse, neglect, household dysfunction — create physiological and psychological patterns that persist for decades. Individuals with four or more ACEs showed a 460% increase in depression risk and a 1,220% increase in suicide attempt risk. These are dose-response relationships between childhood experience and adult functioning.
For young athletes, the implications are immediate. Putukian et al. (2023) documented that adolescent athletes with elevated ACE scores showed higher rates of overtraining syndrome, injury recurrence, and performance anxiety — conditions routinely misattributed to physical causes. Hughes and Leavey (2012) found that elite youth athletes were particularly vulnerable because the same hypervigilance that accelerates early skill development becomes a liability when the demands shift from technical execution to psychological surrender under pressure.
| Pathway | Origin | Impact | Measure |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hypervigilance | Chaos adaptation | Blocks flow | AFP-60 |
| Numbing | Protective shutdown | Blocks regulation | Zen Score |
| Avoidance | Escape from pain | Blocks effort | Pathway |
| Attachment Disruption | Self-reliance | Blocks bonding | TuneIn |
The critical gap is visibility. Most youth coaches receive zero training in trauma-informed practice. They cannot address what they cannot see. And most young athletes have no framework for understanding why their body and mind behave the way they do under stress.
The AFP-60 was designed specifically for the gap between clinical assessment and coaching reality. It does not diagnose. It translates. It takes adversity history and maps it to the four performance impact pathways a coach or mentor can actually work with: hypervigilance, emotional numbing, avoidance coping, and attachment disruption.
For young people, the AFP-60 uses age-appropriate language and frames questions around lived experience rather than clinical terminology. A teenager does not need to be told they have "attachment disruption." They need to see, in their own data, that their pattern of pulling back from teammates during hard training weeks has a source — and that the source is not weakness.
Continuous biometric integration adds a layer questionnaires alone cannot provide. HRV suppression during high-stress training, sleep architecture disruption, and electrodermal reactivity from wearables like WHOOP, Garmin, and Oura create an objective physiological mirror. When a young athlete's AFP-60 profile predicts hypervigilance and their HRV data confirms chronic sympathetic activation, the conversation with their coach shifts from opinion to evidence. The AI surfaces it. The coach and athlete do the work.