Privacy Policy

What is stored

Accounts

When you sign in with Google, Apple, or an email link we keep your name, email address, and profile photo as your sign-in provider supplies them, plus the date you signed in. Accounts belong to adults: coaches, parents, guardians, and other adult members of a team.

Team data

Team name, organization, sport, seasons, schedule, results, line-ups, and the ladder — entered by coaches.

Players

A player is a first name, an optional last name and nickname, a grade, an optional jersey number, whether the player is cleared to play, an optional dominant hand, and — visible to coaches only — uniform sizes, height, weight, and any social handles the coach records. Players are not account holders and never sign in. There are no dates of birth, addresses, or photos of players.

Contact information

A coach may send a private update link for a player. Whoever opens it — a parent or guardian — can submit email addresses, phone numbers, emergency contacts, social handles, a jersey number, and uniform sizes for that player. Those details are stored with the player and, in the app, are visible only to the team's coaches, never to other members. The update link itself shows whoever opens it the details already on file, so they can be corrected, until it expires (after 1 to 90 days, as the team sets) or a coach revokes or replaces it. Removing or deleting the player turns the link off.

Attendance and notes

Attendance records and any notes a coach writes about a player are visible only to that team's coaches.

Contact messages

If you write to us through the Contact page, we keep your name, email address, and message, and a reference to your account if you were signed in, so we can answer. Only Sideline reads them. A message is kept until we delete it, and you can ask us to delete yours through the same page. If you email us instead, at an address on that page, your message stays in our mailbox on the same terms.

How it is used

Only to run the team: showing the schedule and roster to members, letting coaches record results and attendance, and sending the email and notifications each person has asked for, described below. Sideline Coach shows no third-party advertising (the only promotion in the app is Sideline's own card about PRO, shown to coaches on the FREE plan), does not use advertising or ad-personalization signals, and does not sell or share data with anyone for marketing.

What we measure

The app collects usage and error measurements through Google Analytics, so we can see which screens are used and when something breaks. It records:

• the screens you visit, by kind: "a player page", never which player;
• when the app shows you one of its notes about PRO or you tap one, and which plan a checkout was started with, never payment details;
• brief error summaries, cut short, with web addresses and record ids taken out.

It does not record your team's data. A page's address is never sent, by design, so player-update links stay private, and neither is a page's title. Google Analytics tells one browser from another with a cookie and a random id kept in your browser, not by your name, email address or account, and it also learns the kind of device and browser and the general area a visit comes from. The measurements are about the person using the app, a coach or parent, never about a player. Ad and personalization signals are off.

Cookies and what your browser keeps

Sideline Coach sets no cookies of its own. It keeps what it needs in your browser's storage: your sign-in, a copy of what you have viewed so the app opens without a connection, and a few choices, such as which team is open and how a list is sorted. Signing out clears your sign-in and that copy.

Four outside services set cookies or read details of your device:

• Google Analytics sets cookies that tell one browser from another, for the measurements above.
• Google reCAPTCHA checks that requests come from the real app and not from a script. It runs when you sign in, open an update link, send the Contact form, or use the app once signed in; it does not run while you only read the public pages. It collects hardware and software information about your device and browser, sends it to Google for analysis, and sets a cookie of its own. Google processes it for us, as our service provider, only to protect the app from abuse.
• Google and Apple sign-in happen in a window of theirs, which uses their own cookies.
• Stripe, at checkout, sets cookies it uses to spot fraud.

Email you ask for

Sideline Coach emails you only what you ask for. A sign-in link, when you request one, is sent by Google's Firebase Authentication. Everything else is what you turn on in Settings › Notifications, and nothing until you do, with two exceptions. If you coach a team on a PRO trial, we tell you a week and a day before the trial ends, and once after, what changes on the FREE plan. If you are an admin of an organization, we tell you when a team there is deleted, and who deleted it if they are on the organization's staff, unless you turn that off in Settings › Notifications. Coaches can get a morning summary and alerts about their teams; team members can get tomorrow's schedule, schedule changes, and final results. These emails are sent through Twilio SendGrid, which receives your email address and the email itself; open and click tracking are off. Coaches' emails name players only as the app already shows them to that coach, and members' emails carry schedule details and team scores only. None of them includes anyone's contact information, and each has a one-click unsubscribe link. If you buy a plan, Stripe emails your receipts and may email you about a payment that needs attention; those come from Stripe.

Push notifications you ask for

If you turn on push for a device in Settings › Notifications, your browser gives Sideline Coach a push token for that device. We keep it with your account, with a label like "Chrome on Mac" so you can see and remove your devices. Notifications travel through Google's Firebase Cloud Messaging and your browser's own push service (Apple's, Google's or Mozilla's, depending on the device), which carry the notification's text. They say what the matching emails say, the PRO trial notices and the notice of a deleted team included, and never include anyone's contact information. Removing a device, signing out on it, or blocking notifications in your browser stops them.

Payments

If you buy a plan, checkout runs on Stripe, inside the app. Stripe receives your name, email address, billing address (used to work out sales tax), and payment details, and handles them under its own privacy policy. Sideline never receives your card number. We keep Stripe's reference for you as a customer on your account and, on the program you paid for, the plan, its renewal date, its status, who paid, and Stripe's customer and subscription references: enough to show the plan to the program's coaches and to help if something goes wrong. Stripe keeps payment records for as long as tax law requires.

Who can see what

• Members (approved by a coach) see the team's schedule, roster names and grades, results, line-ups, and — if the coach allows it — the ladder.
• Coaches see everything on their team, including contact information, attendance, and notes, and can edit it — except on a team that is view only for them under the FREE plan's limits, which they can see but not change.
• Organization admins (for example, a school's athletic director) see the current season's schedule, results, and line-ups, and the players on that season's roster with their name, nickname, grade, jersey number, dominant hand, and clearance, for every team placed in their organization, read-only — never contact information, attendance, notes, the ladder, or earlier seasons. They also see the name and sign-in email address of each person on their organization's staff.
• Sideline can see account names and email addresses and the teams and organizations each account belongs to; team and organization names, rosters, schedules, results, and line-ups; counts and dates; a program's plan and payment status; and messages sent through the Contact page — in order to support the service, and never player contact information, attendance, notes, update-link submissions, or card details. As a logged support step — for example when a team has lost its only coach — Sideline can approve a request to join a team or make a team member a coach, and that person then sees what the team's coaches see.

Where it lives

Data is stored with Google Firebase (Google Cloud) in the United States, protected by sign-in and per-team access rules. Your device keeps a copy of what you have viewed so the app opens without a connection; signing out clears it. If you remove your account on another device, this one clears its copy when you next open the app on it while online. Deleted data can remain in Google Cloud backups for up to 14 weeks; we use backups only to recover lost data, not to bring back anything deleted on purpose.

Children

Players are minors, but they are not users. Everything about a player is entered by a coach or submitted by a parent or guardian through the update link; the app does not collect information from children directly. A parent or guardian can ask the team's coach to correct or remove a player's information at any time. A coach can correct it, delete the player, which permanently removes the player's information from the app, or delete the team.

Your choices

• Members can leave a team at any time from the Team page.
• You can remove your account in Settings › Account. That deletes your profile, your devices, your team memberships and the email address each team kept for you, your organization staff seats, and our log of the emails and notifications sent to you, then your sign-in. If you pay for a plan that renews, cancel it in Manage Billing first. Some records stay: Stripe keeps the payment records that tax law requires, a program you paid for keeps the record that you paid, Sideline keeps its notes of support actions it took for you and the messages you sent through the Contact page until we delete them, and what you added to a team stays with the team.
• Coaches can remove a player from a season's roster, which keeps the player's record and history and turns off their update link; delete a player, which permanently removes the player's record, contact information, notes, attendance, and update links, and takes their name off line-ups and results; archive a season; or delete the team, which permanently removes its roster, contact information, notes, schedule, results, and memberships.
• Coaches can export a player's or the roster's complete record from the app.

Changes and contact

If this policy changes, the effective date above changes with it. Questions go through the Contact page.