Provenance
Where every rule comes from, and how to check it.
You have no reason to take our word for this. So here’s where the claims come from, what we checked against the original documents, and where we’re still unsure. If a claim can’t be checked, it shouldn’t be made.
The method
Research first, primary sources, cited.
Before anything was built, we read the source material and wrote up what we found, with citations. Three things shaped the product:
- What people complain about: app-store and Trustpilot reviews, more than a dozen Reddit communities, BBB complaints, and privacy reporting by AP, CalMatters and Common Sense Media. Four things kept coming up: ads, reminders that don’t arrive, the maze of invites and family accounts, and data being sold. Those are what the app answers.
- What the good apps already do: the two best-loved apps in this space, gone through feature by feature from their own help pages. That found the gap worth building into: the safety card, the league’s rules built in, and reminders that arrive.
- The rules themselves: Ontario Basketball (OBA)’s published policies, read end to end and listed below. Every requirement we took from them is cited to the section it came from.
Primary sources
Where the rules in the app come from.
Public documents from Ontario Basketball (OBA) and the Government of Ontario. The red flags and the steps back to play are copied word for word, because a club has to use those lists. Anyone else’s tool is copied unchanged or left out.
Where we corrected ourselves
Honesty means showing the mistakes we caught.
The manual beats the plan
We checked the rules we’d written down against the manual. Nine disagreed, and the manual won every time. That included a category we’d drawn too wide, which would have made the app refuse a perfectly legal roster.
A fine the manual argues with itself about
We first read the rules as saying a cancellation fee applied however much notice you gave. That came from a summary, not the manual, and we withdrew it. Then the manual’s own fines schedule turned out to contradict the clause we’d settled on. The app uses one reading, shows the other beside every estimate, and claims neither until Ontario Basketball (OBA) tells us which of their pages to believe.
A clause we read against its own words
One clause looks like a drafting mistake: read literally, it allows the very thing the quiet-hours rule exists to ban. The app bans it, as clearly intended, and we asked the governing body to confirm the wording rather than follow the literal text.
Facts that go stale, dated
A rule read from a manual is true of that edition and no other, so every number here is dated to the edition it came from. When a league publishes a new one, the date is how you tell which you are looking at.
The method
How we read a sport’s rules.
Basketball went first, and it set the bar. We read Ontario Basketball (OBA)’s published policies end to end: the ones listed above, from the athlete-protection policy to the rules and regulations manual. Every requirement we took from them is cited to the section it came from. Where the league’s own pages disagree with each other, the app shows both readings instead of quietly picking one.
That is the method, and it is the promise for every sport that follows: read the sport’s own published rules end to end, cite every number to its page, and never guess. Soccer and hockey are in the app as plain examples: the sport’s own words and the whole safety floor that the law sets, carrying no league deadlines or fines, because those belong to a league whose manual has been read. And where we carry a sensible default across sports, the app says it is our default, not your sport’s law.
Show, don’t claim
Backed by tests, not adjectives.
Nearly every promise on this site has a test behind it, not just a sentence. A few of them:
- A sensitive field is read straight out of the database and has to come back unreadable, not the words that went in. It’s tried with the wrong key, with another child’s record, and with the tiniest change to what’s stored.
- An assistant coach asks for medical details they haven’t been given, and not one word of it comes back. Every admin who opens a record lands in the log the family can see.
- We kill the app over and over while it’s sending reminders. Every reminder still goes out, and goes out once.
- If a team plays house league only, no league requirement shows up anywhere on its screens. That absence is what gets tested.
- We try to move a player to Stage 5 of a concussion return with no clearance letter on file. The app has to refuse.
What the encryption does not protect against is set out on the Security & Privacy page, in a list beside the things it does. First among them: the address you sign in with is stored as plain text, because a sign-in link has to be addressed to something.