Terms of service and acceptable use

Who this is between

WNY Athletics is used by an organization — a club, a region, a league, or a venue operator — which runs tournaments in it, and by the people that organization gives access to. Coaches, families, officials, and spectators use the public parts of a tournament without an account and without agreeing to anything.

Access is granted rather than self-served: an organization is set up with you, through the access request route, not by filling in a signup form.

Accounts

You are responsible for what happens under your account and for keeping your sign-in details to yourself. Access to an organization is tied to a verified email address on your account, so keeping those addresses current is how you keep — or lose — access when you change roles or leave.

If you believe an account or a device has been compromised, sign that device out and tell us. If you find something that looks like a security problem, report it through the contact page rather than posting it publicly.

What the organizing organization is responsible for

The organization running a tournament decides what goes into it and who can reach it. Concretely, that organization is responsible for:

• The people it grants access to. An administrator of an organization can do everything within it, including recording payments and emailing its contacts. Grant it deliberately, and remove it when someone's role ends.
• What is entered about athletes. Nothing in the product requires a date of birth, an athlete email address, or an athlete mobile number. If your event does not need a field, leave it empty.
• Having the right to hold and use that information, including where it belongs to a child, and meeting whatever consent or safeguarding obligations your governing body or your local law places on you.
• What is published. Schedules, brackets, standings, and team pages are public by design. Decide before you publish, not afterwards — and see what becomes publicly visible for the field-by-field detail.
• Match PINs and private links. A match PIN and an official's personal schedule link are access. Hand them out with that in mind.
• The accuracy of what your tournament tells people — schedules, results, standings, and the messages sent from them.

Messaging people, and especially messaging minors' contacts

The product will email an organization's contacts, its teams' coach contacts, and its officials, and — if the organizer switches the channel on — will text staff and coach contacts. It sends what you tell it to send, to the list you point it at.

The boundary is therefore simple and it is not in our favour to blur it. WNY Athletics provides the sending mechanism. The organization decides who is on the list, what is sent, and whether it has the right to send it. That is the organization's responsibility even though the button is ours.

Acceptable use

Do not use WNY Athletics to:

• Upload or publish information about a person you do not have the right to hold or publish.
• Send messages a recipient has asked you to stop sending, or messages unrelated to the tournament they gave their details for.
• Try to reach an organization, tournament, or record you have not been given access to, including by guessing PINs, private links, or identifiers.
• Interfere with the service, its availability, or other people's use of it — including automated scraping or request volumes that degrade it for the families trying to find a court.
• Submit scores or results you are not authorised to submit, or deliberately enter false results.
• Harass, threaten, or endanger anyone, or publish content that does — with the obvious and non-negotiable case being content involving a child.
• Copy the product, or use access to it to build a competing one.
• Break the law, or the rules of the governing body your event runs under.

We may suspend access that is causing harm to people or to the service, and we will say why.

What WNY Athletics provides — and what it does not

We provide the software: registration, scheduling, publishing, scorekeeping, staffing, and the records that go with them. We do not run your tournament.

• We are not a party to your entry-fee arrangements. Fees are agreed between an organization and its teams; the product records what is owed and what has been paid. See entry fees and payment status.
• We do not officiate. Results, standings, advancement, disputes, and eligibility are the organizer's and the governing body's to settle — the change history exists to give them the facts, not the verdict.
• We are not responsible for the accuracy of information an organization enters, or for what an organization chooses to publish or send.
• We do not moderate the content of tournaments in advance.

Your tournament data

The tournaments, teams, rosters, contacts, and records an organization puts into the product are the organization's. We do not sell them, and we do not use them to advertise to anyone.

An organization's administrators can export their own lists as CSV at any time, which is deliberate: leaving should not require our cooperation. What is and is not exportable is listed on the privacy page.

Availability and changes

The product is under active development and changes often. Features are added, changed, and occasionally replaced; when something material changes it appears in what's new.

We make no availability or uptime commitment on this page, and we do not publish one elsewhere either — see what this page does not claim. If you need one in writing for a specific event, ask before the event rather than after.

Changes to these terms

The date at the top of this page is the last time it changed. While these terms are in draft, they will change materially — that is what a draft is for.

Questions

Questions about these terms, about what you would be agreeing to, or about anything here that reads as evasive, go to the contact page. If your organization needs reviewed terms before it can adopt the product, say so — it moves the work up the list.