Explainer
Who gets to set the rules.
Four sets of rules decide how the app behaves: the law, your league’s, your club’s, and each person’s own. Anyone can be stricter than the one below. Nobody can be looser.
What each person picks
Their own choices, inside what the club allows.
Your club’s policy
Covers everyone in the club. Stricter is fine. Looser is refused.
Your league’s rules
Cover the games played under that league: deadlines, fines, roster sizes, who’s certified.
The law
Rowan’s Law, the Rule of Two, Canada’s privacy law, and a guardian’s right to read their child’s messages. Nobody can switch guardian review off. The one exception is a conversation a child kept a guardian out of, where the club’s safe-sport contact watches instead.
Read it from the bottom. The law is built in, and nobody can vote it away.
So you can make things quieter, safer and tighter than the minimum. Try to go the other way and the app refuses, and tells you which rule you hit.
Club policy
A policy that actually runs the app.
Most policies are a PDF nobody opens. Here, what you write also sets what the app does. And it records who has read it.
What you write
Your own wording, dated and kept as a version, so it’s clear what people agreed to and when. It can’t be quietly changed later. Drafts to start from: a concussion code of conduct, a general one, a communication policy, a photo and media policy, and how discipline gets handled.
What it switches on
The part that governs. The same document sets what the app does: when it goes quiet at night, how often a coach may chase the same people, the minimum gap between events, how long a medical unlock lasts. Publish once and it’s live on every team. Chat settings live on their own screen instead: direct messages, attachments, quiet hours, how long messages are kept. The editor says so rather than offering a switch that does nothing.
Who has to read it
You pick which roles must acknowledge each document, and how hard to push. A hard one holds a staff role or a roster spot until it’s signed. That’s how the Rowan’s Law acknowledgment works. A soft one just reminds. Every acknowledgment is recorded, per person, per version. So when the league asks whether every coach signed this season’s concussion code, you have a name-by-name answer instead of a search through someone’s inbox.
The guardrails
What it deliberately is not.
You write English, not code
The words are for people. The settings are set separately, and the two sit side by side on the screen so they can’t drift apart.
You can’t drop below the law by accident
When you publish, every setting is checked against the law and your league. One value too low and nothing publishes. The message names the rule you hit, in plain words.
A document that only informs says so
You can keep a document that changes no settings and asks for no acknowledgment. It’s labelled “reference, not enforced,” so nobody believes a PDF is doing work it isn’t.
An unsigned policy costs a role, nothing else
It can hold a staff role or a roster spot until it’s answered. It never stops a family saying they’re coming, seeing the schedule, or reaching a coach. And an admin is never held, so you can’t lock yourself out.
A worked example
Quiet hours, from the law down to one parent.
The law says midnight to 6am stays quiet for athletes and families. Your club wants more peace than that and sets 9pm to 7am. That’s stricter, so it’s accepted and applied everywhere. Try 1am to 5am instead and the app would be louder than the law for part of the night, so publishing is refused and the message says why.
A parent can then choose to be quieter still. Nobody can make it louder than the law, not even you. Four safety alerts still come through overnight; a suspected concussion is one, because Rowan’s Law says the family has to be told at once.