Written by Doug Goodnough
There’s plenty of training resources and options for athletes to improve their physical performance. However, Rob Pike, ’92, has established a company that helps athletes raise their mental game.
Pike, co-founder of Ryzer Mindset, said his company offers psychological testing to help identify strengths and weaknesses, as well as courses to improve athletes’ “mindset.”
After graduating from Hillsdale College, Pike decided to go to law school and worked for a time at a law firm in Grand Rapids, Michigan. He quickly realized it wasn’t his long-term career path. He gradually transitioned into technology and business development and began to work with psychometric testing for help with hiring potential employees.
“I thought if you could know the psychological profile of someone, and then you know the psychological profile of a job or a company, you could match them up,” Pike said. “They’re more likely to be a fit, more likely to be happy, more likely to be successful.”
However, some businesses were hesitant to take this route in the hiring process, which had Pike thinking about how this could work in other areas.
“I bet this works in sports,” recalled Pike, who admitted he always wanted to work in athletics. “This is probably so needed.”
Pike reached out to former Chargers football teammate Tom Heckert, ’91, who at the time was working in the front office with the NFL’s Philadelphia Eagles.
“I said, ‘Tom, do you guys use psychometric testing?’” Pike said. “And he said, ‘Oh yeah, I use Dr. Troutwine.’”
Heckert referenced Dr. Robert Troutwine, a noted psychologist who worked with professional athletes and organizations as well as the military and businesses. Together, Pike and Dr. Troutwine joined forces using Dr. Troutwine’s Troutwine Athletic Profile (TAP), which measures athletic mindset, as the foundation of a new platform to help athletes and teams with the mental side of sports.
Now, Pike and Dr. Troutwine are business partners who have more than 1,000 clients, including in the NFL, MLB, NBA, as well as major and small college teams. In fact, they have worked with organizations such as the New England Patriots and Kansas City Chiefs.
“We worked with the Chiefs when they decided to draft Patrick Mahomes,” Pike said of his company’s work with the two-time Super Bowl champions. “One of the things that our system does really well is comparisons. And Patrick Mahomes’ top (mindset) comparison was Peyton Manning. So we have Patrick Mahomes’ athleticism with the mindset of a Peyton Manning. That’s something we want to go after. Those are certainly fun things to be a part of.”
Pike said his company is now shifting its focus to individual athletes, especially at the high school and smaller college levels.
“We’re going to try to help the mindsets and the confidence and the grit and the mental toughness,” Pike said of today’s athletes. “Decision-making, composure under pressure—all of those are really important traits for athletes so that they can do better.”
He recently co-published a white paper titled An Anxious Generation of Athletes Too? Time to Sound the Alarm, that outlines the documented decline in mental toughness in young athletes and how to reverse it.
“It’s a big problem,” Pike said of the trend. “No one’s really tried in the sports world to create a (mental evaluation and training) product that can reach the masses. So we’ve got a product that can fill that need for all those millions of athletes.”
Their company provides fee-based online testing for the TAP with athletes ages 13 and older, then shares the TAP report with those who take it and offers varied levels of training and courses. Pike said his company also offers “boot camps” that can accelerate an athlete’s ability to improve their mental game.
Pike, who was a wide receiver for the Chargers, said he could have used this type of mental training during his playing days, especially when he badly injured his knee and had to have surgery to replace his anterior cruciate ligament.
“I look back and I feel like I really did not reach my potential after the injury,” Pike said. “The mentality was once you blow your ACL, you’re never coming back. But the surgeon repaired it with the new reconstructive techniques, and he said, ‘You will be stronger than ever.’ But I just could never get it out of my head that I was good to go, that I was full strength. I look back and I wish I had someone who could have taught me the mental skills so that I could have come back from the injury to become the best version of myself.”
Pike, who majored in business, said he enjoyed his Hillsdale experience, including being named a football team captain during his senior season.
“I feel like my Hillsdale degree is worth more every day,” said Pike, who was a member of the Delta Sigma Phi fraternity. “The value of that education, being in that fraternity and being on the sports team—I wouldn’t trade any of that for anything else.”
Pike and his wife, Amy (Lynch), ’94, and their daughter, Carson, reside in the Chicago area.
Doug Goodnough, ’90, is Hillsdale’s director of Alumni Marketing. He enjoys connecting with fellow alumni in new and wonderful ways.
Published in August 2024
