At MVR, our mission is to provide athletes, coaches, and team business offices with a high quality service that will reduce biases in the evaluation and selection of athletes and help win games. We provide easy and powerful tools to evaluate a player’s athletic smarts.
We are former high school and NCAA Division I college athletes who competed at the highest levels in a variety of sports, including football, wrestling, and weightlifting. In high school, some of us either achieved all-state status or won state championships. Our athletic abilities allowed us opportunities to receive athletic scholarships, compete against tougher competition, and receive a great education at colleges and universities across the country.
Our professional backgrounds are in sales, marketing, statistics, psychology, and engineering up to the PhD level. We also have experience recruiting and selecting people for positions within various levels of government and Fortune 100 companies.
For some of us, including MVR cofounder Dr. Daman Bryant, the quest for accurate and bias-free testing and assessment has not only a professional but also a personal foundation. As an African American growing up in the rural South, Dr. Bryant experienced both culturally biased testing and the use of testing as a way to limit opportunity. After a lifetime of employment in the field—from working for Educational Testing Service to testing prospective IBM engineers in Southeast Asia to assessing health outcomes at Humana—he’s now working with MVR to change all that.
“A good test helps unearth hidden gems,” Dr. Bryant says. “It tells us who has abilities that poverty and lack of access might have hidden. It tells us where someone might need help. It helps us to know where we might most readily engage people at their level of skill and understanding.”
MVR’s unique and innovative assessment and analytic capabilities are proving to be of immense value to individual athletes as well as to college and professional teams. But our goals extend beyond the playing field.
“Companies and pro teams leave money and victories on the table all the time because they do not understand the true abilities of their employees and players,” Dr. Bryant explains. “For the rest of us, it’s about proper fit, about getting people into education and jobs that engage them at their levels and their abilities.“
A list of our team members is below.
Dr. Damon Bryant's professional career has been dedicated to recruiting, evaluating, and selecting human talent. From physical and mental assessments to behavioral-based interviews and assessment centers, he has used a variety of methods to evaluate human resources for the purpose of employment selection or placement into training programs within very large organizations. He has taken the results of physical and mental assessments and included them within mathematical models to predict how people will perform under various work conditions at a later point in time. This directly applies to college football recruiting as teams look to fill their rosters with high school recruits who have the potential to develop into great collegiate players. The MVR recruiting platform is designed to collect sports performance data and evaluate players in a fair and systematic way. Our goal is to make sure coaches will select the right person given the role requirements and the environment in which the individual will perform.
Dr. Larry Davis oversees technological approaches to our solutions. Dr. Davis was instrumental in the development of an automated item generator and in the creation of the Smart Test Technology platform. For IBM, he developed artificial intelligence that analyzed 85 validated employment questions; he then created automated item generators that generated more than 10,000 psychometrically valid assessment items that are used throughout Asia in evaluating prospective engineering employees. Likewise, AIG used approximately 150 model questions to generate nearly 10,000 questions for a recent higher education client.
Joseph G. DiLorenzo is a long-time Boston-based business and community leader. Mr. DiLorenzo more recently has been the Chief Strategic Officer of Hotbox Sports, a patented, unique B2B approach to fantasy sports. Prior to that Mr. DiLorenzo was the only local partner and part of the senior executive team with the former heads of Paramount, Disney and Touchtone Picture Group, Paramount Studios, and a major California developer and acted as President/ COO of Plymouth Rock Studios.
In 2002.Mr. DiLorenzo and former Massachusetts State Treasurer, Joe Malone, co-founded the M/D Group, a firm that specializes in corporate strategy and business development initiatives. Prior to that, Mr. DiLorenzo was Vice President of Strategic Alliances and later Chief Financial Officer of Jenzabar, a leading provider of higher education enterprise infrastructure software and solution’s company with locations on over 1,000 locations globally.
He is most known for having worked for more than seventeen years with the Boston Celtics, primarily as Chief Financial Officer and later Senior Vice President of Administration, including roles that helped take the Boston Celtics public on New York Stock Exchange, as well as the acquisition and second NYSE public offering of Boston’s Fox Channel 25 and radio station WEEI. and the concept and construction of the world-class Sports Authority Training Center , which houses the Celtics training facility and the construction of the Fox Boston TV station. He also worked with the Boston Garden/Boston Bruins organization for many years, starting part time as a minor and ultimately becoming a department head.
Mr. DiLorenzo graduated from Bentley University with a degree in Accountancy and is a board member of the Bentley Executive Club after serving many years as a Director, Officer and two-term President of the Bentley University Alumni Association.
Mr. DiLorenzo has many volunteer roles including Chairman of the Board and long-term board member of the Financial Executives International (FEI), an international organization of senior financial executives with more than 10,000 active members from 5,000 companies in North America. He has served on many committees for FEI including his role as initial Chairman and member of the Diversity Committee. He also participated in the Organizational Alignment and Governance Task Force and is past Chair of the FEI Hall of Fame Selection Advisory Council. He is past two-term ex-officio member of the Board of the Financial Executives Research Foundation, past board member FEI Canada and Past-President of the Financial Executives International Boston Chapter.
He was past-President of the Treasurer's Club of Boston; a two-term past-President and current board member of Community Work Services; a member of the Greater Boston Advisory Board of the Salvation Army; former trustee and current member of the Audit Committee and Board of Overseers for Franciscan Hospital for Children in Boston; a former corporator and member of the Board of Visitors of New England Baptist Hospital, a former member of the Board of Visitors of Thayer Academy and a member of the Board of the Massachusetts Chamber of Commerce along with having served on other non-profit Boards in the past.
He was also a founding owner of the Maine Red Claws, the National Basketball Association Development League’s minor league affiliate of the Boston Celtics and formerly of the Philadelphia 76ers and Charlotte Bobcats and has been the recipient of a number of awards for his volunteer service.
Vidur V. Bhogilal has 20+ years of professional experience and has managed audit, taxation, accounting, legal and M&A functions in leading companies. He is the Vice-Chairman of Lumina Datamatics and has managed several successful acquisitions, mergers, and restructuring in India, the US and the UK and played a key role in tax recoveries, forex management, financial planning /control and fund raising.
Vidur is a gold medallist and a rank holder Chartered Accountant (CA) and Cost Accountant (ICWA) from India. A Certified Public Accountant (CPA) from the US, he is also a law graduate. Prior to joining Datamatics group of companies, he has worked with JM Morgan Stanley and Arthur Anderson, among other organizations.