RinkNotes for hockey teams, coaches, and parents

The subject of a development note is a rostered minor player. The users are the team’s coaching staff, who capture notes, and the player’s parent, who controls consent and sharing. This is not a product children log into.

A parent grants consent per player. Until they do, no note can be stored against that player — the database itself enforces this, not just the interface. If a parent withdraws consent, capture stops and the team’s named copy is purged within a defined grace window.

With RinkNotes you speak what you see during games and practices — there are no forms to fill in. The app transcribes your note, sorts it into a stat, a piece of feedback, or a practice action, and you review and confirm it in a live feed before it counts. Setting up a team takes about ten minutes, and there’s a free 7-day trial with no credit card required.

General team apps focus on scheduling, rosters, and messaging. RinkNotes is built for player development: coaches capture what they see by voice, and it becomes per-player feedback, game stats, and practice suggestions — with parental consent enforced at the data layer and a parent portal to view, correct, export, or withdraw. If you want a hockey team app that does development feedback rather than only admin, that’s the gap RinkNotes fills.

A coach can record short voice notes from the bench. The audio is transcribed by our subprocessor and then discarded — we never store it. Only the resulting text is kept, and only for a consented player. The transcript is shown for review before anything is saved.

No. A generated summary names only its own subject. Any teammate or opposing player is referred to only by role, never by name.

Today, the club, team, or program is the payer — RinkNotes doesn’t bill families directly. How that gets funded is flexible, and we’d rather be upfront about it: especially early on, an organization might not cover it. Sometimes parents pool together to pay for it themselves; sometimes a coach folds it into the coaching fees they already collect outside the org’s tools. Whoever ends up paying, the product and your rights as a parent are exactly the same — your consent and control over your child’s data never depend on who’s footing the bill.

Players never sign themselves up — there’s no player self-registration, and there won’t be. For older, phone-age players (13 and up — the kind of thing that comes up with Jr, AAA, and similar teams), we plan to let a parent provision an account for their child. When that’s available, those accounts will only be creatable through a sign-in that lets us verify age directly with the provider — Google or Apple — so magic-link email and other logins won’t be allowed for player accounts. A parent provisions it, controls it, and can revoke it at any time, and the parent’s consent still governs everything the player can see. This is on our roadmap; it isn’t built yet.

Yes, anytime. From your parent page you can withdraw consent — capture stops immediately and your page clears — or download a complete export of everything held about your child. The right to export remains even after you withdraw, and you can ask your coach to send a fresh consent request if you change your mind.

Retention follows roster and consent, never billing. An unpaid team’s data is retained or purged on exactly the same rules as a paid team’s.

Anthropic (Claude) classifies and summarizes development text; ElevenLabs (Scribe) transcribes audio. Both are contractually barred from training on the data, and both are disclosed in the consent a parent grants.

A short setup wizard walks you through it in about ten minutes: create your team, invite staff, add your roster, send consent requests to parents, activate the free 7-day trial (no credit card), and capture your first note. Send consent requests early — a coach can’t capture notes about a player until that player’s parent has granted consent.

Yes. RinkNotes is built for hockey at every level — minor and youth, AAA, junior, college and university, and adult teams. What changes with the level is who owns consent: for a minor it’s the parent, for an adult it’s the player. Minor-team setup is fully self-serve today; junior, college, and adult programs often have their own compliance requirements, so we set those up with you directly — reach out and we’ll get you going.

Consent is always granted by whoever owns the decision, and the model is set per team. For a minor player, the parent grants and controls consent and gets a parent portal. For an adult player, the player grants consent for themselves. Either way, nothing is captured or shared about a player until consent is granted, it’s enforced at the database layer — not just in the interface — and it can be withdrawn at any time.

Yes — goaltenders get their own development track rather than being treated as skaters with unusual stats. That means goalie stats (like saves and goals against), feedback grounded in goaltending, and drills built for the crease. A safeguard guarantees a goalie is never handed a skater’s drill: if no goalie drill fits the focus area yet, the plan says so instead of substituting one.

Yes. Skills camps run a dedicated goalie variant: goalie-grounded feedback, goalie stats, and goalie-only drills, with a snapshot after each session and one cumulative development report for each goaltender at the end of the camp — something a camp can hand every family. Camps are priced per event, so talk to us and we’ll set it up.

Yes. A tryout is an evaluation flow for players who aren’t on your roster yet — skater or goalie. Consent is collected per trialist before any evaluation, and until a trialist’s consent is granted their notes are automatically de-identified, so you can’t build a named record on a player whose family hasn’t agreed. Tryout reports stay developmental — they never state a selection outcome.