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Risk & duty of care

The question is never
“was there an injury?”

It is “what did the school know, when did it know it, and what did it do?” Most athletics programmes cannot answer that in writing. That is the exposure Better Athlete closes.

Empty school gymnasium or training field, early morning. Nobody in frame. Quiet, institutional, slightly serious.

What the record looks like over a season

Flags caught before they became injuries.

Illustrative pattern from a typical fall season — the gap between what got flagged early and what actually became time-loss is the whole case for logging in the first place.

Weekly flags vs. time-loss injuriesone squad · 12-week season
Reports flaggedBecame time-loss

Reports flagged trend upward as logging becomes routine — while time-loss stays flat. Illustrative, drawn to match published secondary-school injury-surveillance ratios; ask us for the source pack.

What changes legally

An unbroken record, made automatically.

Nobody has to remember to document anything. The record is a by-product of the programme running normally — which is precisely what makes it credible.

1
The athlete's own report, time-stampedShe logs how she feels and any pain. It is her voice, dated, not a coach's later recollection of a conversation.
2
The escalation, with a name on itWhen something crosses the clinical line it routes to your trainer or nurse and records who received it and when.
3
The decision that followedModified session, held out, cleared — recorded against the flag that prompted it. Cause and response, linked.
4
Exportable on demandA single athlete's full history as a PDF for insurers, counsel, parents, or a return-to-play review.

“Reasonable care is not a feeling. It is a documented sequence: you were told, you acted, you recorded it. Programmes lose on the third one.”

Risk framing · for review by counsel

Legal language, to be reviewed by the school's own counsel. Better Athlete does not provide legal advice.

Duty of care, on one continuum
The continuum of care: healthy, warning, into care, in care, return — she moves both ways and her record goes with her.
This is the paper trail every flag creates — a caught Shift routes into care and back, on the same record, so the board gets a defensible answer either direction.

The clinical line

The system knows what it is not.

The fastest way for a school to create risk is to let software look like it is making medical decisions. Better Athlete is built so that cannot happen.

It does not diagnose.

A read is a screening view of how training is landing. The language is training language — push, hold, ease — never clinical.

Certain answers leave the training conversation entirely.

A short, fixed list of reports stop the athlete and route her to a person. The app does not attempt to interpret them.

Your trainer and nurse hold clinical authority.

Nothing overrides them. Clinical detail is visible only to clinical roles, and coaches never see a private note or a clinical finding.

Private stays private.

Menstrual-cycle and mental-health entries are never visible to a coach, an AD, or a parent. Restricting that data is a risk control, not a feature.

Data & records

Student data, handled like student data.

Role-scoped by default

Every role sees only what its job requires. Leadership sees de-identified rollups; business roles see aggregate only.

The record belongs to the athlete

She keeps it when she leaves. The school holds a copy for the period of enrolment, per your retention policy.

Export & deletion on request

Full export or deletion for any athlete, on parental or institutional request, without a support ticket.

Your policy, not ours

Retention windows, consent language and parental-access rules are configured to match your existing student-records policy.

The bottom line

Insurers ask for evidence.
So do parents, eventually.

The programme that can produce the sequence is in a materially different position to the one that cannot.