Who Is Nathan Last? The Youth Sports Psychologist Behind Mental Grit Consulting

Last updated 2026-06-16 · Reviewed by Steven Ellis

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Career and rise

Nathan Last is the founder and Chief Performance Officer of Mental Grit Consulting, a performance psychology practice based in Riverton (Salt Lake City), Utah, focused on teen athletes and the families and organizations around them. He is the person behind the @mentalgrit handle on Instagram and Facebook — worth noting because "Nathan Last" is not itself a widely searched public name, and the @mentalgrit identifier is the primary way he's found online.

A note on disambiguation: this profile covers Nathan Last the sports performance psychologist operating Mental Grit Consulting, reachable at mentalgritconsulting.com and @mentalgrit across social platforms. He is not affiliated with any other public figures who may share the surname.

Last's academic foundation is the most distinctive thing about his positioning in a crowded mental coaching space. He holds a Master of Science in Exercise and Sports Science with a concentration in the Applied Psychosocial Aspects of Sport and Sport and Performance Psychology from the University of Utah (completed 2015), followed by an Executive MBA from Utah's David Eccles School of Business (completed 2024). Those two credentials together — graduate-level sport psychology and business management — are not common among practitioners who market to parents of teen athletes online, where the barrier to calling yourself a mental performance coach is effectively zero. For parents evaluating coaches for their high-school-aged athletes, that academic differentiation matters.

His background as an endurance athlete also informs his practice. Last has completed multiple half-Ironman (70.3) races and at least one full Ironman (140.6) — a self-reported figure as of the Peak Tri Coaching Podcast (2018) — making him someone who has personally navigated the mental demands of sustained, high-pressure athletic performance, not just studied them. That experiential layer has practical relevance when working with athletes facing the pressure of competition: he can draw on genuine lived experience, not just clinical framing.

The CoachUp platform, where he is listed as a mental skills coach in Salt Lake City, reports work with over 150 athletes (self-reported). His practice has grown to include institutional clients: the International School of Bangkok and Olympus Aquatics Center are listed as Mental Grit Consulting partners as of June 2026. The Bangkok relationship in particular suggests the model can extend beyond local, in-person work to distributed institutional programs — a notable operational proof point for a practice based in Utah.

His team has expanded to include Andy Riise, MS — a West Point graduate, retired U.S. Army Lieutenant Colonel, and former MLB mental skills coach. That hire reflects a deliberate positioning choice: the military and professional baseball track records carry distinct credibility signals in the youth athletics world, and Riise's background reinforces that Mental Grit is not a solo-practitioner cottage operation.

The method they teach

The center of Mental Grit Consulting's approach is the Performance Profile — an individualized mental skills assessment that maps each athlete's specific psychological landscape before any training begins. This is the structural choice that distinguishes Last's methodology from generic confidence or mindset courses: the assessment comes first, and the subsequent program is shaped by what it reveals.

The Performance Profile examines where a given athlete actually stands across the mental skills that determine competitive performance: management of anxiety, focus and concentration, resilience under pressure, response to failure, confidence stability, and the ability to execute under elevated stakes. Rather than prescribing a fixed curriculum to every athlete who enrolls, the profile produces a map of individual strengths and vulnerabilities, and the 90-day intensive program is built around addressing that specific map.

The six core problem areas Last's practice targets are explicit on his website and marketing: performance anxiety, fear of failure, burnout, perfectionism, inconsistent performance, and low confidence. These aren't abstract concepts in the teen athlete context — they're the live, recurring complaints that parents describe when they're searching for help. A swimmer who freezes on the block. A baseball pitcher who loses command under pressure. A tennis player who can't close sets. A gymnast who falls apart in meets after performing cleanly in practice. The Performance Profile framework is built to diagnose and address those specific failure patterns rather than deliver generalist inspiration.

The 90-day intensive is the primary vehicle for that work. Following completion, the program transitions to lifetime maintenance programming with community access — a structure designed to embed the mental skills developed during the intensive into ongoing competitive careers, rather than treating the work as a one-time intervention. This is a notable design decision: athletic mental skills, like physical conditioning, require maintenance to hold under pressure across seasons, not just a single focused training block.

Last's practice also addresses the family unit as a component of athlete development, acknowledging that parental dynamics — how parents communicate about competition, how they respond to a poor performance, how their expectations land on a teenager — are a meaningful variable in teen athlete psychology. Mental performance coaches who work exclusively with athletes while ignoring the parent relationship miss a significant piece of the system.

The sports covered span a practical range: swimming, triathlon, tennis, baseball, lacrosse, golf, water polo, and gymnastics. These aren't randomly chosen — they're sports with long competitive development timelines, high pressure stakes at the club and prep level, and significant technical skill that breaks down under mental load. They're also sports where parents are deeply invested and where the cost of mental blocks is compounding across multi-year athletic careers.

This places Last's work in the same broader category as practitioners who have written and coached extensively on mental toughness in youth and professional sport — though Last's assessment-first architecture and academic background give his approach a more clinical shape. The core belief is the same: physical preparation is necessary but insufficient, and the mental layer is trainable, not fixed.

Programs and pricing

Mental Grit Consulting's offering structure is built around an intake-first model: the free strategy call functions as the diagnostic gate before any program or pricing is presented. This is common in high-touch coaching practices where the right intervention depends on athlete-specific variables, and where a mispriced or misaligned program serves neither party.

The core program stack, based on publicly available information as of June 2026:

The institutional MG Partner Program is deliberately capacity-constrained. Last reports (as of June 2026) that the program runs in limited cohorts — seven programs per 3-month window — which positions it as a premium institutional relationship rather than a broadly available group product. Schools and athletic organizations interested in this track should expect a longer lead time and a conversation-based enrollment process.

Pricing being entirely gated behind strategy calls is a deliberate model choice with legitimate rationale: a teen athlete with burnout and a young swimmer with performance anxiety in championship season require different scopes of work, and pricing that reflects that variation doesn't fit a clean public price list. Prospective clients should plan for pricing to be presented after the strategy call surfaces the athlete's situation. The entry point — the free call — requires no financial commitment to engage.

Content engine teardown

Last's content presence is modest relative to creators who've built their practices primarily through social media scale. His Instagram (@mentalgrit) and Facebook (facebook.com/mental.grit) accounts are his primary channels, with a YouTube presence as well, though follower counts across platforms are not large by creator-economy standards. His content strategy reflects the practice model: it's practitioner content aimed at parents and athletes who are already searching for mental performance help, not broad-reach content designed for viral discovery.

The Instagram feed runs a recognizable pattern: short-form content that names a specific mental challenge teen athletes face — the pre-meet anxiety spiral, the fear of disappointing parents, the perfectionist who can't process an imperfect practice — and frames it in terms that resonate with a parent who has watched their kid go through it. The content doesn't need mass reach to work; it needs enough presence to be found by someone who is already problem-aware and searching, and to communicate credibility at the point of discovery.

Facebook, where the Mental Grit page lives as the Nate Last / Mental Grit page, functions similarly — a channel for reaching parents directly in the demographic that still uses Facebook as a primary platform. Given that the buyer for teen athlete mental coaching is almost always a parent making the decision (or at minimum co-deciding with their teenager), Facebook reach to that demographic is more practically valuable than Instagram or TikTok volume driven by the athletes themselves.

The Peak Tri Coaching Podcast appearance (Episode 17, 2018) is one of the cleaner documented third-party records of Last articulating his approach to a general endurance audience — a useful artifact for anyone who wants to hear his thinking beyond the website. His podcast positioning as an endurance athlete who coaches mental performance maps naturally to that audience.

The BestCompany.com presence — five reviews at a 5.0 rating as of June 2026 — is a small sample by volume standards, but the consistency and the platform represent structured third-party documentation that goes beyond self-reported claims. It's a minor signal, not a definitive one, but it points in the right direction.

Reception and reach

The honest picture of Mental Grit Consulting's reception is this: it is a credentialed, specialized practice with a demonstrated track record — over 150 athletes coached (self-reported via CoachUp), institutional partners in two named organizations, a five-star review average on BestCompany, and a team that includes a retired military officer and former professional baseball mental skills coach — but it operates at a regional and niche-specialist scale where third-party press coverage is sparse. That isn't a credibility problem; it's an accurate description of most legitimate specialized practices that haven't chosen to build their business through public content scale.

For parents evaluating mental performance coaches for their teen athletes, the relevant differentiators are clear. Nathan Last holds graduate-level academic credentials in the specific domain he practices, which is verifiable and uncommon. His framework is assessment-first and individualized rather than generic. His team has institutional experience (Andy Riise's MLB mental coaching background is a notable signal for the sports families he's targeting). His practice has been accepted as an institutional partner by an international school and an aquatics organization — two client categories that apply more scrutiny than individual parents do before engaging.

The gaps are the honest ones. Independently audited client outcomes don't exist publicly, so claims about athlete improvement are unverifiable from the outside. The program is sold through a gated intake process, so buyers can't evaluate cost against alternatives without engaging first. Social media presence is functional rather than expansive, meaning discovery through organic reach requires some search intent already. None of these are disqualifying; they're context for evaluating the offer with appropriate clarity.

For a parent whose teenager is hitting the specific patterns Mental Grit Consulting addresses — the anxiety that shows up in competition but not in practice, the fear of failure that's limiting an otherwise prepared athlete, the burnout setting in mid-season — Last's academic grounding and structured methodology represent a more credentialed option than much of what is available in the mental performance coaching market for youth athletes. The strategy call is a low-friction way to assess whether the fit is right before any financial commitment is required.

Practitioners in the adjacent performance coaching space who take a systems view of athlete development — including University of Utah-affiliated sport psychologists working in similar geographic and institutional contexts — represent useful comparisons for families researching this category, as the Salt Lake City region has meaningful institutional depth in applied sport psychology.

No regulatory actions, complaints, or documented disputes were identified during research for this profile as of June 2026. For comparison to a practitioner who coaches performance coaches on building client acquisition systems, see the profile of Dr. Matt Shiver.

Frequently asked questions

What does Nathan Last teach?

Nathan Last teaches mental performance skills for teen athletes through an individualized assessment-first model. His Performance Profile maps each athlete's specific mental strengths and gaps — covering areas like anxiety management, confidence, focus, and resilience — before prescribing targeted training. The 90-day intensive that follows is built around that profile, not a generic curriculum. His broader framework addresses the core issues that derail young athletes: performance anxiety, fear of failure, burnout, perfectionism, and the frustration of performing inconsistently despite physical preparation. He also coaches the family unit, recognizing that parental dynamics are a significant variable in teen athlete performance.

How much does Mental Grit Consulting cost?

Pricing is not published publicly on the Mental Grit Consulting website as of June 2026. The standard entry point is a free strategy call, which serves as the intake to understand a given athlete's situation before any program is presented. The institutional MG Partner Program — available to schools and athletic organizations — operates in limited cohorts (self-reported: 7 programs per 3-month window) and is also priced privately. Prospective clients should expect pricing to surface in the strategy call conversation, not in advance of it.

Is Nathan Last legit?

Yes — Nathan Last's academic credentials and track record are verifiable. He holds a Master of Science in Sport and Performance Psychology from the University of Utah (completed 2015) and an Executive MBA from Utah's David Eccles School of Business (completed 2024), which places him on more formal academic footing than most online mental performance coaches. His CoachUp profile reports work with over 150 athletes, and Mental Grit Consulting holds a 5.0 rating across 5 reviews on BestCompany.com as of June 2026. His team includes Andy Riise, MS — a West Point graduate, retired U.S. Army Lieutenant Colonel, and former MLB mental skills coach — a meaningful signal about the firm's institutional seriousness. Independent third-party press is limited, which is common for specialized regional practices at this scale, but the credentials, team composition, and institutional partners (International School of Bangkok, Olympus Aquatics Center) provide meaningful grounding.

Related coaches

Sources

1. Instagram profile — Nathan Last (@mentalgrit): https://www.instagram.com/mentalgrit/?hl=en
2. Mental Grit Consulting — official website: https://www.mentalgritconsulting.com/
3. Mental Grit Consulting — Team / Partner program page: https://www.mentalgritconsulting.com/team/
4. Nate Last — Mental Grit Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/mental.grit/
5. CoachUp profile — Nathan L. (mental skills coach, Salt Lake City): https://www.coachup.com/coaches/nathanl-8
6. Peak Tri Coaching Podcast Episode 17 — Mental Grit Consulting: https://www.peaktricoaching.com/podcast/2018/1/26/episode-17-mental-grit-consulting/
7. Mental Grit Consulting reviews — BestCompany.com: https://bestcompany.com/businesses/mental-grit-consulting

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