Leagues & Compliance
A team doesn’t have rules.
It plays under them.
Every deadline, fine, roster cap and safety rule your managers run from memory today sits in the app instead, under the league each team actually plays in. the Ontario Basketball League (OBL) basketball is the worked example, matching Ontario Basketball (OBA)’s published rules, Rowan’s Law and the Rule of Two. Your league goes in the same way.
The main idea
Your league’s rulebook, in the app.
Rules the app can act on. Not a PDF a volunteer manager is expected to have memorised.
Your league’s rules go in
Deadlines, how fines are worked out, smallest and largest roster, call-up limits, who has to be certified, shift tables, curfews, jersey and seeding rules, protests, when results are due.
Every game knows its league
Each event belongs to a league, and the countdowns and warnings come from that league’s rules. A practice or an exhibition just uses your club’s defaults, quietly.
No league, no nagging
Run an OBL team and a house-league team off one roster and the cancel screen shows a countdown, a fine estimate and where to send notice for one of them. For the other it shows none of the three. We test for that silence.
The worked example
OBL basketball, 2025–26: typed out of the manual.
This is what a league looks like once it is in, and it shows what yours can look like. Not summarised. Typed out, then checked line by line against the manual itself. Nine numbers disagreed on the first pass. The manual won all nine.
Roster rules
One OBA club team per player per season, refused at registration. The second one won’t save. An oversize roster is refused too, and so is going over the OSBA/D-League cap, because those are the league’s own limits and not the club’s to approve. A roster that is under the minimum warns instead, because a short bench is a problem to solve, not a rule you have broken.
Cancelling, word for word
Pull out with 48 hours’ notice and it’s an automatic 2–0 forfeit with no fine. Without notice: your registration fee split across the scheduled games, plus $100. With proper notice the banner says “no fine applies” in as many words.
Call-ups
Younger club players only, an email to the league at least 48 hours before the game, and a limit of four games or one tournament. The countdown and the email are already written for you.
Equal playing time
The U9–U12 shift tables (ten players means exactly four shifts each) and the 24-hour window to report a violation. After it closes, nothing is reviewed. The tables, the record and the clock are built. There is no screen yet that tracks shifts live during a game.
Your sport, your league
The setups in the library, and how your league goes in.
Basketball is the worked example; the same setup works for any team sport.
| League | Sport | What you get |
|---|---|---|
| OBL 2025–26 | Basketball | The worked example: every deadline, fine, cap, shift table and certification, typed out of the manual. |
| Rec soccer | Soccer | A plain example: sensible deadlines and roster sizes, kick-off instead of tip-off, no fines, shifts or protests. |
| Rec hockey | Hockey | The same plain shape for hockey, with puck drop as the start. |
| House league | Basketball | Relaxed, most clocks off: a rec season without the sanctioned-competition nagging. |
| No league | Any sport | Every league clock off: your club’s rules only. The law still holds. |
Take one as it is, or adjust the numbers
Pick one that’s ready, or adopt the closest and change the deadlines, roster sizes and fine formulas to match your own league. Your changes sit on top: when the league publishes next season’s rules you get them without retyping, and your adjustments stay. The concussion rules and the law can’t be adjusted away.
A team can be in more than one
One team can play an OBL season, a tournament and exhibitions. Each game follows the right league’s rules; practices use your club’s defaults.
Rowan’s Law: every Ontario sport
The concussion protocol, step by step. Not a checkbox.
The app handles what your club has to do. It never diagnoses anyone and never gives medical advice. Only a doctor or nurse practitioner does that. On every screen: “When in doubt, sit them out.” The return-to-play steps are the same Rowan’s Law protocol that covers all Ontario sport; only the activity words change by sport.
On the sideline, on a phone. Start an incident and the red flags come first. The 911 step is plain text and a dial button, so it keeps working if the signal drops while it’s open. It cannot be opened with no signal at all: that is what the printed safety card in the bag is for. Then what was seen, off the court, stay with them and call the guardian, then the report form, filled in from what you entered, with 24 hours to file it.
Off the court means off. An open incident makes the player ineligible in every lineup straight away, even for you, and never touches whether the family says they’re coming.
Basketball is only the example shown. The steps below are OBA’s “Return to Basketball”, in its own words. A soccer or hockey team sees the same steps in the same order under “Return to Play”.
Safeguarding
The Rule of Two, built in.
The Rule of Two is the Canadian safeguarding standard across sports; Ontario Basketball (OBA)’s Athlete Protection Policy is the version used here. A young athlete is never alone, one to one, with an unrelated adult in authority, and messages between adults and children can be seen by someone else.
Witnessed, or it doesn’t exist
The check happens before anyone types a word. A conversation that would leave one adult alone with a child can’t be started, and the screen says who to add to fix it.
Guardians can read it, with one exception
Every guardian of a child in a conversation can read the whole thing. The exception is a conversation their child shut them out of, where the club’s safe-sport contact watches instead. Oversight, without a parent inside every coaching message.
Nothing lands at 1:30am
In any conversation with a child, a message written at 1:30am is held and delivered at 6:00. The message, not just the buzz. Families can never override it. Staff can, and have to write down why.
One thing we deliberately don’t do: messages aren’t end-to-end encrypted. If nobody could read the record, the guardian and admin review this policy requires would be impossible. Families are told that, in plain words, in the app. See Security & Privacy.
Your club’s policy governs the app
Your rules, in force on every team.
What your club writes down also sets what the app does, and records who has acknowledged it. Put one value below what the law requires and nothing publishes at all. The message tells you which rule you hit.
An unsigned policy can hold a staff role or a roster spot, and nothing else. It never stops a family saying they’re coming, seeing the schedule, or reaching a coach.