Youth safety

A coach can start a private conversation with a player. If that player is under 18, their parent or guardian is added to the conversation before the first message is sent. This is not a preference a coach sets or a habit they have to remember:

• ·The guardian is added by the system, not chosen by the coach. Recipients are expanded on the server from the team roster. A coach names the player they want to talk to; they do not assemble the audience.
• ·The audience cannot be edited afterward. Once a conversation exists, nobody — including the coach who started it and the team owner — can add or remove participants. Changing who is involved means starting a new conversation.
• ·It is re-checked on every message. Each send re-verifies that a qualifying adult guardian is still linked to that player. If the last one is removed, the conversation stops accepting new messages. Existing history stays readable — it is not deleted to cover a gap.
• ·A second coach is never a substitute for a parent. Additional coaches can be included in a conversation, but they do not satisfy the guardian requirement. Only a parent or guardian does.
• ·No guardian, no conversation. If a player under 18 has no parent or guardian linked to their roster spot, a private conversation with them cannot be created at all.

Players who are 18 or older are adults, and a coach can hold a private conversation with them without a guardian present. On a high school roster this will apply to some seniors.

Only an adult coach on the team can open a private conversation. Players cannot start one — not with a coach, and not with a teammate. There is no player-to-player direct messaging in XO Gridmaker at all.

Accounts we do not have an adult or teen age signal for, and accounts under 13, cannot be included in a private conversation under any circumstances.

Alongside private conversations, each team has a single group channel. Every active member reads the same messages — coaches, players, and parents together. There are no side channels or hidden groups within it.

The coach who owns the team controls it: approving who joins, removing any message at any time, or switching messaging off entirely. Turning it off leaves existing history readable rather than erasing it.

This section matters more than the others, because everything above depends on it and because it is where most platforms are vague.

We store an age range — under 13, 13 to 17, or 18 and over — and never a date of birth. That range comes from what a person tells us when they sign up, and on iOS and Android it can be informed by the declared age range Apple or Google reports for the device account. Guardians confirm their own adult status when they link to a player.

This is self-declared, not identity verification. We do not check government ID, run an age-estimation service, or otherwise prove that someone is the age they say they are. Accounts created before August 2026, when this system was introduced, were recorded as adults based on their prior use of the product rather than on any age signal.

One control worth knowing: once an age range is recorded, a user cannot quietly change it themselves. Corrections go through us.

Some things a school or league may require are outside what this product does. If your policy depends on any of the following, XO Gridmaker will not satisfy it on its own:

• ·No administrator oversight of conversations. There is no view that lets an athletic director, principal, or league official read team or private conversations they are not a participant in. Neither can we — reading a team's messages requires being in them.
• ·No transcript export or records retention guarantee. There is no way to export a conversation, and we make no commitment about how long messages are kept. If your district has a records-retention or public-records obligation covering coach communication, this product does not meet it.
• ·Messages can be deleted. A message's author can delete it within 15 minutes, and a coach on the team can remove any message at any time. Deletions leave a visible placeholder and record who performed them, but the original text is not retained. This is not a tamper-proof log.
• ·We don't prevent contact outside the product. Nothing stops someone from sharing a phone number in a message and continuing a conversation by text. What happens in XO Gridmaker is all we can speak to.
• ·We don't certify compliance. Rules differ by district, school, state, and league, and yours governs. We've described the mechanics so you can check them against your own policy; we can't tell you that using this product makes you compliant with it.

Any member can report a message, a shared play, or a Coach Cal response from where they see it. Reports capture the content as it appeared at the time and go to a review queue we monitor. We act on violations, including removing content and suspending accounts.

If something needs attention faster than a report, or you're an administrator evaluating XO Gridmaker for a school or league and want to talk through any of the above, please get in touch.