How we keep young players safe, written down before you have to ask.
For any player under 18, their parent or guardian is added to every message thread automatically, by the system, at the moment the thread is created. This is enforced in the database, not by staff remembering to do it.
There is no private channel between an adult and a child anywhere on this platform. There is no feature to create one.
Players cannot privately message each other. Community channels are group channels, each with an adult from our team present, and a guardian can read any channel their child is in.
Every post and message has a report button. Reports go to a designated safeguarding contact — deliberately not to the coach involved, because a young person should never have to report a coach to that coach.
We act on reports the same day and, where the law requires, we report to the appropriate authority.
We track total training load across every team a player plays for, not just ours, and reduce our prescription when the total is unsafe. During a growth spurt we deliberately pull volume back.
A coach who tells a fourteen-year-old to do more, always, is not a good coach. Sometimes the right plan is a smaller one.