Privacy Policy

This explains what Startline collects, where it goes, and how to get it deleted. Most of the people using Startline are high-school players and their parents, so we collect only what the product needs, we never sell it, and we don't use it for advertising.

Players must be 13 or older

Startline is for players aged 13 and over. We do not knowingly collect personal information from children under 13. If the player is under 18, a parent or guardian should set up and supervise the account.

The only age information we ask for is a graduation year. Our forms and our servers refuse a class that would make the player younger than 13.

If we learn that a player is under 13, we delete the account and everything attached to it. If you think that has happened, email ricky.ybarra@getstartlineapps.com. You don't need an account to ask, and we won't ask for anything beyond what identifies the record.

What we collect

• Your account: the email you sign up with and your password, which our sign-in provider stores scrambled (hashed) — we never see it.
• The player profile (the intake): name, graduation year, boys' or girls' side, home city and state, the email coach replies should go to, a phone number for your email signature, position and stronger foot, height, club, league and ODP level, GPA and SAT/ACT scores, intended major, school size and budget preferences, achievements, upcoming events, a social media handle, and your club coach's name and email. Transfer players also tell us their current college, division, eligibility and reasons for moving. Most questions are optional.
• Film and schedules: a link to highlight video, or a video file you upload, and any schedule file you upload. Uploaded files are stored privately and can only be opened through short-lived links.
• Your voice intro (optional): if you record a spoken intro, your browser's speech recognition turns it into text (Chrome, for example, uses Google's speech service for this). We keep the text and the “voice profile” built from it. We don't keep the audio.
• What you do in the app: schools, clubs and camps you follow or activate, which schools you drafted emails to, coach contacts and replies you log, reminders, and referral invites. Some things are kept only on your device, never stored on our servers: your headshot photo and your pipeline board.
• Coach replies you forward to us: if you use your personal tracking address, we receive those emails and keep the sender, subject and a short snippet to update your tracker. We only see what you choose to send there. We never access your inbox.
• Your public profile page (optional): if you publish it, the fields you pick are visible to anyone with the link. It is hidden from search engines. We log when it's opened, and from which school's link when we can tell, using a one-way code instead of the viewer's IP address.
• Short links in the coach emails you send (optional): if you add your player page to a draft, the email carries a short Startline link for that school, and one for your film. When a link is opened we record which school it was sent to, which link, the time, and whether it looked like an automatic check by mail software. We do not store the IP address or anything else about who opened it, and we set no cookie on them.
• Payments: your plan (a monthly subscription, or a Recruiting Season Pass with the date you bought it, the amount, the dates it runs and any refund) and Stripe's customer and payment references. Never your card number.
• Forms you can use without an account: the free target list (player name, graduation year, position, side, club or level, email, and GPA if you give it), the newsletter signup (email, and optionally which side and topics you follow), and the club inquiry form (name, club, role, email, message, and a phone number if you add one).
• Usage and device: privacy-friendly analytics from Vercel (no cookies; it counts page views and a few product events, like finishing the intake), your notification subscription if you turn notifications on, and standard server logs (such as IP address and browser type) that we keep briefly for security.

Much of what you enter is saved on your device first. When you're signed in, your intake answers and the schools, camps and clubs you follow are also saved to your account, so they follow you to another device. Other things are copied to our servers when you use a feature that needs them — activating a school, publishing your profile page, building your voice profile, or uploading film or a schedule. Our own cookies only keep you signed in, remember when you're viewing the demo, and remember a friend's referral code if you arrived through one. No advertising or cross-site tracking cookies.

What we use it for

• Scoring where a player fits, building school and club lists, and drafting coach emails.
• Sending what you asked for: your target list, reminders, the weekly briefing, billing notices and account email.
• Running your account, taking payments, and answering you.
• Keeping the service secure and working, and improving it using totals, not individuals.

Startline is small. Our founder may read a free target-list request to build it by hand, and sees account data when helping you or fixing a problem.

What we never do

• Sell or rent your information, or use it for advertising.
• Share a player's details with coaches or clubs. You do that, when you send an email or share your profile link. (The one exception is a club plan — see below.)
• Read your email inbox, or email college coaches on your behalf. We draft; you send.

Who else handles your data

These companies run parts of Startline for us and use the data only to do that:

• Supabase — our database, sign-in, and private file storage.
• Vercel — hosts the website and app, and runs the privacy-friendly analytics.
• Stripe — payments and subscriptions.
• Resend — sends our emails, and receives mail sent to your tracking address.
• Anthropic — the AI model (Claude) behind a few optional features, below.
• Sentry — error reports when something on our servers breaks, so we can fix it. A report can include the page or request that failed.
• Upstash — short-lived counters that stop one visitor from flooding our forms or AI features. Most are keyed by IP address and kept for about a minute; the daily limit on the spoken summary is keyed by your account ID and kept for a day.

If you turn on notifications, they're delivered through your browser or phone maker's push service (Apple, Google or Mozilla). Our maps load from OpenStreetMap. We may also disclose information when the law requires it.

AI features

These run only when you use them. What is sent to Anthropic:

• Building your voice profile: the text of your spoken intro.
• Drafting an email “in your voice”: the draft itself — which can include the player's name, graduation year, position, club, academic details and film link — plus your voice profile.
• Reading a schedule you upload: that file, to pull out dates and opponents.
• College news and results summaries: public athletics pages only. No player data is sent.
• Getting an AI read of film you add: still frames cut from that film on your own device, with the jersey number, kit color and position you gave us. We do not keep the frames. The film itself stays in private storage that only your family can open, and the read describes play: it does not identify or profile anyone else in the film. A parent or guardian must agree before film of a player under 18 is added, and you can delete a film, and everything made from it, at any time.
• Asking Ask Startline a question: what you type, the earlier messages in that chat, and which page you are on. It is not told who you are and it cannot read your profile. We do not keep the conversation: it stays in your browser tab until you close it, and we keep only a count of questions, so please do not type anything private.

Under Anthropic's commercial terms, what we send is not used to train its models. Always read an AI draft before you send it.

The AI voice. Our weekly briefing may include an audio summary read by an AI-generated voice modeled on our founder's own voice, made with the founder's consent. It is a synthetic voice, not a person. It is not switched on today. If we turn it on, the company that generates the audio (ElevenLabs) will receive only the text being read.

Club plans

If your club provides Startline through a club plan, the club's director can see, for each family on the club's roster: the player's name, graduation year and position, and their progress — whether the profile is done, how many schools are on the list, how many coach emails were drafted and sent, whether a coach replied, any offers recorded, and the date of the latest activity. Directors never see the text of your emails, which schools you're talking to, or what coaches wrote back. Deleting your account removes you from that view.

Coaches and club staff

Startline shows families the coaching staff at colleges and clubs. We collect names, job titles, work email addresses and, where published, work phone numbers from the staff pages that schools and clubs publish themselves, and we record the page each came from. We also use these to tell high-school and club coaches about Startline. Those emails are sent through Instantly, an email-outreach service, and every one of them has an opt-out. No family's data is ever sent to Instantly.

If you're a coach or staff member and want your details removed, email ricky.ybarra@getstartlineapps.com — from your work address if you can, or tell us which page it came from. We'll remove them and keep you off our email lists.

Keeping and deleting your data

We keep your data while your account exists. Going back to the free plan deletes nothing: the schools you activated stay open, the rest of the paid features lock again, and any activations you hadn't used wait for you if you come back.

Delete it yourself: Profile → Delete my account and data. It cancels any subscription first, then permanently erases your plan records (including a Season Pass), the player profile and intake answers, your lists, follows and tracker, uploaded files, voice profile, public page, referral code and sign-in, and clears the app from that device. Or email ricky.ybarra@getstartlineapps.com and we'll do it for you — you don't need to be signed in to ask.

A few things outlast an account, on purpose:

• Stripe keeps its own records of past payments, as the law requires, and we may keep a minimal record that a paid plan existed and was canceled, for tax and billing disputes.
• If you unsubscribed from our emails, your address stays on our do-not-email list so it stays that way.
• A referral record you were part of stays for the other family, with your email removed.
• Deleted data can remain in our database provider's backups until they roll over (up to 30 days) and in short-lived server logs. We don't restore deleted accounts from them.
• Emails already delivered stay in the recipient's inbox, and our email provider keeps a delivery log for a limited time.

Your choices

• Edit or clear your answers any time from your Profile.
• Unpublish your profile page; the link stops working.
• Unsubscribe from the weekly briefing and reminders from any email, and turn off notifications in Preferences.
• Ask for a copy of your data, or a correction, by email.
• Delete your account, as above.

Changes

If we change this policy we'll update the date above, and tell you in the app when the change is significant.

Contact

Questions, requests, or deletion: email ricky.ybarra@getstartlineapps.com and we'll answer.