Privacy Policy

Upper Arlington Special Olympics is a small, volunteer-run club. We are based in Upper Arlington, Ohio. We are chartered under Special Olympics Ohio, a Program of Special Olympics International.

We care about the families and athletes we serve. This page explains what we collect on our website. It also explains why we collect it, who can see it, and how we keep it safe.

We use people-first language here. For example, we say "an athlete with an intellectual disability," not "a disabled athlete."

What we collect

We only collect what we need to run the club. Here is the list.

Family contact info. Your name, email, phone, and mailing address.
An "Also email," if you add one. One more adult's email address, like a spouse or your athlete's other parent, so they get a copy of our emails to your family. Only add someone who has said it's OK. We email that address once to ask, and send it nothing more unless they say yes. We use it for those copies and nothing else, and it doesn't let them sign in. It is not on the roster. The coaches of your athlete's sport see it only in the list of addresses they use to email their sport's families, so their emails reach that adult too.
Athlete details. Each athlete's name, birth date, and uniform size.
Sport assignments. Which sports each athlete plays.
Photo and media consent. Your choice about photos and video of your athlete.
Medical form date. The date a doctor signed your athlete's medical form. This website does not collect or store the form itself. The club keeps the paper form (see "About the paper form" below). This comes later, not at first signup.

We do not sell your data. We do not share it for ads. We do not share it with anyone outside the club, unless the law makes us.

Why we collect it

We collect this info to run the club well and to keep athletes safe.

Contact info lets us reach you about practices, events, and changes.
Athlete details help us place each athlete and order the right uniform.
Sport assignments help coaches plan and lead.
The medical form date tells us an athlete has a current clearance to take part, and when it runs out.

Who can see your info

We limit who can see your info. Most club info is seen only by club admins and the family it belongs to.

The coaches of your athlete's sport(s) also see what they need to reach you and to look after your athlete at practices and events: each family member's name, phone number, email and home address, and the athlete's birth date and uniform size. A coach sees this only for the sport(s) they coach. Coaches of other sports, and other families, never see it.

The volunteers of your athlete's sport(s) see only your athlete's name, so they know who is coming. They never see your phone number, email, address, or anything else about your family or your athlete. Coaches and volunteers who sign up on our website see none of this until a club admin approves them.

Medical form dates and health-related fields are more sensitive. So we guard them more closely. Only these people can see them:

Club admins. The volunteers who run the club.
The owning family. You can see your own athlete's info.
Coaches of the athlete's sport(s). A coach can see whether an athlete in their sport has a current medical form and the month it runs out, and any health-related fields the club has added.

Coaches see this info read-only. That means they can view it but not change it.

We let coaches see health info on purpose. This is a safety choice. A coach may need to know about a health need during practice or a game. For example, a coach may need to know an athlete's seizure plan. Knowing this ahead of time helps the coach keep the athlete safe.

We keep a record of every change to an athlete's medical status. The record shows who confirmed a form, when they confirmed it, and any change to the date it runs out.

About the paper form. A doctor signs your athlete's medical form on paper. You give the paper to your coach or a club admin. A club admin files the original in a folder at home. Your athlete's coach keeps a copy and brings it to practices and events, so your athlete's medical information is at hand if it's needed. When a newer form replaces it, or your family leaves the club, the old form and its copies are shredded. The form is never scanned, photographed, or put on this website. The website holds only the date it was signed and the date it runs out.

How we keep your info safe

We use strong safeguards to protect your info. These include:

Locked accounts, so only approved people can sign in.
Access limits, so people see only what they need.
A change log for every medical status, so we can see who confirmed what and when.
Collecting as little as we can. We hold a date, not a health record.
A spam check on the contact form and the sign-up form. When you send one, our website host, Vercel, looks at technical details from your browser, such as its type and settings, to tell a person from an automated program. We use this check only to stop spam. It is not used to track you or for ads. (We also count visits to our public pages. "Counting visits" below explains how.)

About HIPAA

You may have heard of HIPAA. HIPAA is a federal health-privacy law. It applies to health plans and most health-care providers.

HIPAA does not legally apply to our club. We are not a health plan or a health-care provider. So we cannot and do not claim to be "HIPAA compliant."

Even so, we choose to protect medical info with strong, HIPAA-grade safeguards. In plain words: the law does not require this level of care from us, but we hold ourselves to it anyway.

Accounts and minors

A parent or caregiver always holds the family account. An adult athlete who is their own guardian may hold their own account.

Minors never get their own logins. A parent or caregiver always signs in for them.

How consent works

When you agree to something, we save it as a record. This is more than a checked box. The record stores:

Who agreed. A parent, a caregiver, or an adult athlete who is their own guardian. A coach can never give this consent for a family.
Which version of the text they agreed to.
How we captured it. For example, online or by phone.

If we change the text later, we ask you to agree to the new version.

Photo and media consent

We sometimes take photos or video at practices and events. We may want to share them, such as on our website or social media.

You choose whether we may use your athlete's photo or video. You can say yes or no. You can change your choice at any time. Just contact us.

How long we keep your info

We keep your info only as long as we need it.

For medical forms, we keep only dates — the day a doctor signed the form and the day it runs out. We never hold the form itself. We keep the current date plus one older one for each athlete, so we can show your history. When you add a new date, the oldest one is retired.

When your family leaves the club, we remove your data within 30 days. Every deletion is logged.

Your rights

This is your info, and you have rights over it. You can:

See the info we hold about your family.
Update info that is wrong or out of date.
Delete your family's info.

To use any of these rights, contact us at the address below. We will help you.

If there is a data breach

A data breach means someone sees or takes your info who should not. We work hard to prevent this. If it happens, we act fast.

Ohio law guides us here. We follow the Ohio breach-notice law, Ohio Revised Code § 1349.19. If a breach reaches families, we will tell you without needless delay, in the way and time the law requires.

Our change log helps us here. It shows which records were changed and by whom. So we can tell you what was affected.

Because we never store medical forms, a breach cannot expose one. The most sensitive things we hold are contact details, athlete birth dates, consent records, and any fields the club has added.

Counting visits

We use Google Analytics to count visits to our public pages. It tells us which pages people visit, roughly where they are (a city or region, not an address), and what kind of device and browser they use. It tells us which website someone came from, for example Facebook or a search engine. It sees only that website's name, never the page they were on. It also tells us when someone presses a Sign up button, but not what they type in the form. This helps us see what families use, so we can make the website better.

We also count visits to the club's help pages for volunteers: the club manual and the admin help page. There it tells us which help page a volunteer opened, from which kind of screen, and which chapters of the manual they read. This helps us make the help better.

It only runs on our public pages and the help pages. It never runs on the sign-up form, the contact form, sign-in, My info, or any screen that shows a family's details.
It does not see your name or email. It never sees anything you type into a form.
It uses a cookie. A cookie is a small file in your browser. It lets Google tell a new visit from a return visit.
Google keeps this visit information for 14 months. Then it is deleted.
We turned off Google's advertising features. Your visits are not used to show you ads.
If your browser sends "Do Not Track" or "Global Privacy Control," we don't load Google Analytics at all.

You can also turn off Google Analytics on every website with Google's free browser add-on: tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout.

Emails we send

We only email you about the club and your own family. We never send ads. We never put medical details in an email.

Here is every email our website sends.

A welcome note. Sent once, right after you sign up. It says who is signed up and points you to the forms.
A sign-in link. Sent only when someone asks to sign in with your email address.
"We have your forms." Sent once, when the club records that it has an athlete's signed forms. It goes to the other adults in that athlete's family.
Medical form reminders. Sent 90, 60, and 30 days before an athlete's medical form runs out. These reminders help keep every athlete cleared to play, so they can't be turned off.
A yearly check-in. Sent once a year, in the summer before the season starts. It asks you to look over your family's details on the website. If they are still right, you don't need to do anything.
A weekly summary for club admins. Sent only to the volunteers who run the club. Each admin can turn it off on the admin dashboard.
Alerts for club admins. Sent only to admins, and only when something on the website is broken.
A note to club admins when a coach or volunteer signs up. Sent only to admins. It gives the person's name, whether they want to coach or volunteer, and the sports they picked, so an admin can approve them.

The first three only come when something happens: you sign up, someone asks to sign in, or the club gets your forms. So there is nothing to turn off.

If you add an Also email on your My info page, we first send that address one short email. It says someone asked for copies of our emails to go there, and asks them to confirm. It does not name you or say anything about your family. If they confirm, that adult gets a copy of each of these emails that we send you, and is included when a coach or a club admin emails your athlete's sport or the whole club. If they don't, we send them nothing more. Each copy says at the top that it is a copy and who asked for it, and has a link they can press to stop the copies. You can stop them too: empty the Also email box and press Save also email. Either way, any copies still waiting to go are not sent.

When you write to us with the contact form, your note is emailed to the club so a person can answer you.

Every email says who it is from and why you got it. You can reply to any of them, and a real person will read it. If an email reached you by mistake, please reply and tell us.

Changes to this policy

We may update this policy over time. If we make an important change, we will let families know. The date of the latest version will appear on this page when we publish it.

Contact us

Questions about your privacy? Please reach out.

Write to us using the contact form at ua-so.org/contact. It reaches the club coordinator.
Who we are: Upper Arlington Special Olympics, a volunteer club in Upper Arlington, Ohio, part of Special Olympics Ohio.