StatLap for athletic directors

What it is, in one paragraph

StatLap turns phones your programme already owns into a timing system. One phone at the start listens for the gun and marks the moment it fires. A second phone films the finish line and reads the time each athlete crosses in. The times go to a public page for that meet, which parents can read without an account. There is no hardware to buy, no cabling, and nothing installed on school computers.

What app-timed means

Every time StatLap produces is labelled app-timed, on screen and on every results page and export. It means the clock started from the starting signal rather than from a person's thumb, and the finish was read from video rather than judged by eye. It does not mean certified.

StatLap is not a certified fully automatic timing system. It is not sold as one, and the label is not something a coach can switch off. If a mark has to be certified on the day, the meet needs a certified system and an operator, as it always has.

Where these times belong

Reasonable uses

• Practice and time trials, where the alternative is a coach with a stopwatch.
• Dual and tri meets run by the schools themselves, where the result decides the afternoon and nothing else.
• A programme's own records and rankings, kept with the label attached.
• Showing athletes and parents a time on the day instead of a week later.

Not for these, and StatLap says so on the page

• Any mark that has to be certified: qualifying marks, state and national records, or results a governing body will accept as official.
• Championship meets run under an association's timing rules.
• Any situation where an appeal would turn on the timing method.

Rules differ by state, by association and by season, and they change. StatLap does not tell you what your association permits, and you should be wary of any vendor who does. Ask them directly what they accept for the meets in question, and treat StatLap's times as app-timed in that conversation.

What happens to the students' data

What is public

The same things a printed programme or a meet results sheet has always carried: name, school or club, event, mark and place. Results pages are public and free to read, with no account, which is the point of them.

What is not

Birth dates are optional and never shown. Email addresses, sign-ins and training logs are never public. There is no advertising on StatLap and no personal information is sold or shared.

Who can read messages

A club's message thread belongs to an athlete, not to a coach and an athlete. Only the club's administrators can read or write in one, officials added to run meets cannot, and every account linked to that athlete, a parent included, reads the same thread. There is no private channel between an adult and a student, by design, and messages cannot be edited or deleted by anyone.

Who gets an account

An athlete or a parent asks to be linked to a profile and a club administrator approves it. Nobody is signed up automatically, and an athlete with no account still has public results.

Reporting something

Anyone in a thread can report it, on the website or in the app. The report goes to StatLap support and to the club's administrators together, so there is always a reader outside the club.

Deleting an account

An athlete or parent can delete their own account from their settings, immediately and without asking us. Published results stay, because they belong to the meet and the club that posted them, as a programme would.

What it costs the school

Timing at practice, the Film Room and every public results page are free, with no account and no card. A club plan is what publishes a meet's times to the club's own page as they happen. Nothing a coach has entered is deleted if a plan lapses, and results stay public and exportable either way.

Six questions worth asking before you say yes

1. Which meets does the coach intend to use it for, and is a certified mark at stake in any of them?
2. What has your association said about app-timed results for those meets?
3. Who at the school will be the administrator on the account, and who is left as an official?
4. Are parents told that results are public, and that they can be linked to their child's profile?
5. Has the coach run it beside your existing timing once, before it matters?
6. Who do we contact if something in a message thread needs looking at?

Talking to us

Write to support@statlap.com. An athletic director asking about a school's data gets an answer from a person, not a form, and if the answer is that StatLap is not the right tool for a meet, that is the answer you will get.