What we hold, and who can read it

1Who we are and who this covers

Vault is the college recruiting platform operated by CheerForward. This policy explains what information we collect about the people who use it, why we hold it, who else can see it, how long we keep it, and what you can ask us to do about it.

It covers four kinds of account, and the rules differ between them, so where something applies to only one it says so:

• Athletes — cheer athletes building a recruiting profile, most of whom are between 13 and 18 years old.
• Parents and guardians — an adult an athlete has added to their account, who can read that athlete's conversations with coaches.
• College coaches — staff at college cheer programs, verified by CheerForward before they can see any athlete.
• CheerForward staff — the people who run the platform, evaluate athletes and moderate it.
• Visitors — anybody reading the public pages without an account at all.

2What this policy applies to

This policy applies to the Vault website and to the emails we send you about it. It applies to everything you enter into the platform and everything we record about your use of it.

It does not apply to what other people do with information you choose to give them. If you send a coach your phone number in a message and that coach texts you, the text message is between you and them. If you follow a link out of the platform — to a college's own website, a video host, or a social account — you are on somebody else's site under somebody else's policy.

It also does not cover CheerForward's in-person events except insofar as information from those events is entered into the platform. A combine has its own registration and its own paperwork; what ends up here is the evaluation.

3Information you give us

Most of what we hold is what you typed. An athlete account can contain all of the following. None of it is bought from anybody else; your rating and any badges are CheerForward staff's judgements of you, made in person:

• Your name and email address, which you give us when you create an account.
• Your date of birth. We use it for two things and no others: deciding whether you are a minor, and placing you in a graduation class. It is never shown to a coach.
• A parent or guardian's email address, if you choose to add one. Adding one is optional and nothing on the platform waits on it.
• Your recruiting profile: high school, hometown, graduation year, the positions you compete at, and — if you enter them — GPA, class rank and standardised test scores. If you are a college athlete looking to transfer, it also holds that you are a transfer, the college you attend or last attended, its level, how many college cheer seasons you have completed, and the year you would start at a new school.
• A profile photo, and any videos and highlight video links you add to your profile.
• Videos you upload for a weekly challenge, and anything visible or audible in any video you upload; your weekly challenges, their status, and the notes staff write to you about them.
• Your Vault Rating and every score behind it, including every previous version of it.
• Your height, which only CheerForward staff record, and the date they measured it if they measure it in person. You cannot enter it yourself.
• Any badges CheerForward staff award you, what each one is for, and any note staff write when they award or remove one.
• Messages you exchange with coaches, including who read them and when.
• What you told us you are looking for in a program: divisions, distance from home, how much academics and game-day atmosphere and championship contention matter to you.
• The schools you save to your shortlist, the notes you write on them, and the events you sign up for.
• The steps you tick on your recruiting checklist, and when you ticked each one.
• Anything you write to CheerForward staff — a change request, a verification request, a support email.

4Information we collect automatically

Using any website leaves ordinary technical traces, and this one is no exception. We collect the following without you entering it:

• Sign-in records: when you signed in, and whether it succeeded. A sign-in to your account by CheerForward staff (section 7) is recorded there too, and separately in the audit log.
• Server request logs: the pages and API endpoints your browser asked for, the time, the response status, and how long it took.
• Your IP address, and the browser and operating system your browser reports. We store the IP address on a consent record specifically, so that a recorded consent has some evidence of where and by whom it was given.
• Error reports when something on the platform breaks, which can include the page you were on and the action you were taking.
• Whether an email we sent you bounced, so that we stop sending to an address that does not work.
• Message delivery and read state — whether a message you sent has been opened by the person it went to.

5Cookies and similar technologies

We use cookies for one purpose: keeping you signed in. When you log in, our authentication provider sets cookies in your browser holding a session token, and your browser sends them back on each request so that the server knows who you are. Deleting them signs you out; blocking them entirely means you cannot sign in at all.

We do not use advertising cookies, tracking pixels, cross-site trackers, or third-party analytics that follow you around the internet. There is no advertising network embedded in this platform and no social media tracking script.

Your browser may also store small amounts of data locally to remember interface state — which filter panel you last had open, for example. That never leaves your device and we never read it back.

Because we set no advertising or cross-site tracking cookies, there is nothing for a Do Not Track signal or a Global Privacy Control signal to switch off here. We mention it so that the absence is a stated fact rather than an omission.

6How we use your information

Every use of your information falls under one of the following. If a use is not on this list, we are not making it:

• Running your account — signing you in, showing you your own profile, remembering your settings.
• Making you findable by verified college coaches, which is the purpose of the platform.
• Producing and publishing your Vault Rating, and showing you the components behind it.
• Ranking schools for you privately, using what you told us matters. Your fit percentage for a program is never shown to that program.
• Showing you the CheerForward gyms, and the clinics, camps and other events, closest to the hometown you gave us.
• Delivering messages between you and coaches, and telling you when one arrives.
• Emailing a parent or guardian you have added, when a coach messages you.
• Safety and moderation — reviewing conversations, investigating reports, locking or flagging a thread, and removing accounts.
• Keeping the service working: diagnosing errors, preventing abuse, and enforcing rate limits.
• Meeting legal obligations, and keeping the permanent records described below.
• Telling you about things on the platform itself — an evaluation result, an event, a change to this policy. We do not sell advertising space in these emails and we do not send you other companies' marketing.

7Messages and monitoring: who reads what

This section describes the part of the platform people are most often surprised by, so it is stated plainly and near the front rather than at the end.

CheerForward staff can read every message on this platform. Not a sample, not only after a report — all of them, at any time, without notifying you first. Staff can also lock a conversation so no further messages can be sent in it, and flag it for review. Staff cannot post in a conversation: there is no mechanism anywhere in the platform for a staff account to send a message, so a message always shows who actually wrote it. Moderation here is oversight, not participation.

We do this because the platform puts minors in direct written contact with adults they have not met, and a private channel between those two parties with nobody able to look at it is not something we are willing to operate. You should decide whether to use the platform knowing that, which is why it is disclosed here rather than in a sub-clause.

A parent or guardian on an athlete's account can read every conversation that athlete has with a coach. If the athlete is under 18, that is not a setting: it cannot be switched off by the athlete or by the guardian. If the athlete is 18 or over it is still on, and this is a deliberate choice on our part rather than an oversight — one rule is the rule that gets explained correctly, and a per-age toggle is the kind of setting that is mis-set once and becomes a safeguarding incident. A guardian can read; a guardian can never send a message as the athlete.

Adding a guardian is optional. An athlete with no guardian on their account has nobody in that role reading along — CheerForward staff can still read every conversation, as above, but there is no second adult on the thread. If you are a parent and that matters to you, ask your athlete to add you; if you are an athlete and you want an adult you trust to see your conversations, add them.

If you write to a college program whose coach is not on Vault yet, we email what you wrote to the address we hold for that coach, along with your first name, the first letter of your last name and the program you wrote to. Your email address, your rating and the rest of your profile are not in that email. The coach answers through a link that puts their reply into the same conversation, where a guardian on your account and CheerForward staff can read it like any other message.

A message cannot be edited or deleted once it is sent — not by you, not by the coach, not by CheerForward staff, and not by anybody holding our own database credentials. A whole conversation can be removed, which is what an account deletion or an erasure request does. The reason for the asymmetry is that nobody should be able to quietly remove the one line that reads badly and leave the rest standing.

We keep a record of which messages have been read and when.

Messages are not the only private thing staff can open, so the rest of it belongs in the same section rather than somewhere you would have to go looking. CheerForward staff can also read the working parts of your account that nobody else sees. If you are an athlete, that is the schools you have shortlisted with your own stages and notes on them, what you told us you are looking for in a program, and the searches you have saved. If you are a coach, it is your recruiting board including the private notes you have written about athletes, your saved pipelines and who is in them, and the roster spots you have said you are recruiting for. No other athlete, no other coach and no parent gains any of this; it is staff only.

We do it because the people who run this platform are asked for help by people who cannot describe their own screen, and support that cannot see the screen is guessing. Two limits come with it and both are enforced by the database rather than by a screen choosing not to offer the option. From a staff account, staff can read these things and cannot change them: there is no mechanism anywhere in the platform for a staff account to move a card on a coach's board, edit a note, add or remove a school from an athlete's list, or alter a pipeline. The one way staff can change an athlete's is by signing in to that athlete's account, as the next paragraph describes; a coach's cannot be changed by staff at all. And every single time a staff member opens one of them, a line is written to an audit log recording who looked, at what, and when — a log that, like the other permanent records here, cannot be edited or deleted by anybody, including us. If you ever want to know whether somebody has looked at yours, that record exists and we can answer from it.

Staff can also sign in to your account as you, to see and use the platform exactly the way you do. We do it for support, and it can happen without you having asked. It does not sign you out anywhere, and you are not told at the time. Before any such sign-in begins it is written to the same audit log — which member of staff, whose account, and when — and when the member of staff ends it, that is written too. A sign-in that ends some other way, for example because you signed out everywhere or changed your password, has only its start recorded. This is the one exception to a line being written for each thing staff open: while signed in as you they see the working parts of your account through your own screens, and what the log holds is the sign-in. While signed in as you, a member of staff can see everything you can see and can do the ordinary things you can do, such as correcting a profile field. If you are an athlete, that includes the working parts of your account, so that support can fix them for you: a member of staff signed in as you can add or remove a school on your list, move it between stages, write or change a note on it, reorder your top schools, change what you told us you are looking for and your saved searches, tick or untick the steps you tick yourself on your recruiting checklist, and take back a weekly challenge video staff have not yet approved or sent back. Each of those changes is written to the audit log as it is made, naming the member of staff, your account, what was changed and when; the log records which parts changed, not what a note says. What they still cannot do is everything else this section and section 9 say staff cannot do. They cannot send a message or start a conversation as you, and reading your messages does not mark them as read. They cannot block or report anybody for you, or lift a block you placed. They cannot sign you up for an event or take you off one. They cannot invite, change or remove a guardian on your account, or email one in your name. They cannot change whether you are emailed about your messages, or change your password. For a coach, they cannot change your board, your notes, your pipelines or your roster needs, or invite an athlete in your name. They cannot accept this policy, or a guardian's acknowledgement, in your name. Each of those is refused from a staff sign-in, by the database itself or by the platform asking the database before it does anything, so they stay yours alone.

8What CheerForward staff can do

Staff accounts are the most privileged on the platform, so here is the complete list of what they can reach:

• Read every athlete profile, including dates of birth and email addresses.
• Read every message and every conversation, as described above.
• Read an athlete's shortlist of schools, with the stages and notes they have put against each one.
• Read what an athlete told us they are looking for in a program, and the searches they have saved.
• Read which steps of an athlete's recruiting checklist they have ticked.
• Read a coach's recruiting board, including the private notes that coach has written about athletes.
• Read a coach's saved pipelines, who is in them, and the roster spots the coach says they are recruiting for.
• Read every rating and every previous version of every rating.
• Read every consent record.
• Sign in to your account as you, to see and use the platform the way you do, and on an athlete's account change their shortlist, its stages and notes, what they told us they are looking for, their saved searches, and the steps they tick on their recruiting checklist. Each sign-in is recorded in the audit log: which member of staff, whose account, when it began, and when staff ended it. So is each of those changes.
• Edit athlete profile fields, including the ones an athlete cannot edit themselves after verification.
• Approve or reject a coach's application to be verified, and an athlete's verification request.
• Lock or flag a conversation.
• Turn a paid feature on or off for an account by hand, without a payment being taken.
• Remove an account entirely.
• Record an athlete's height as measured in person, and award or remove a badge.
• Label an athlete with short private tags, such as where they train, a group or their graduation class, and keep named lists of athletes, to organise their work and to set challenges for a group. Tags and lists are seen only by CheerForward staff: never by the athlete, a parent or guardian, or a college coach, including while a member of staff is signed in as the athlete. They are deleted with the account.
• Record a rating, which no other kind of account can do.

9What CheerForward staff cannot do

The list above is long, so the limits on it are worth stating with the same specificity. These are enforced in the database itself rather than by a screen choosing not to offer the option, which means a bug in the interface cannot get around them:

Staff cannot post a message in any conversation, or send one as you. Staff cannot edit or delete a message that has been sent. Staff cannot edit or delete a rating record once written — a correction is a new version, and the old one stays. Staff cannot edit or delete a consent record, or the staff audit log. Staff cannot change your email address or your role from inside the platform, because an email change without re-verification is an account takeover and a role change is a privilege escalation.

From a staff account, staff cannot change the working parts of your account described in section 7 — an athlete's shortlist, stages and notes, or a coach's board, pipelines and roster needs. They can be read and they cannot be written, and the difference is a property of the database rather than of the screen: there is no staff write permission on any of them for a bug in the interface to find. A coach's cannot be changed by staff by any route. An athlete's can be changed only by a member of staff signed in as that athlete (section 7), and each change is recorded in the audit log under that member of staff's name.

Signing in to your account as you (section 7) does not get around any of this, beyond the athlete's working parts just described. A message, a new conversation, a block or its removal, a report, an event sign-up or its removal, an invitation sent by a coach, adding, changing or removing a guardian, an acceptance of this policy or of a guardian's acknowledgement, and a change to a coach's working parts each have to come from you: the database can tell a staff sign-in from your own, and refuses them from one.

Turning a paid feature on by hand cannot change a rating, a ranking, or any score on this platform, and there is no route by which it could. Payment information and scoring are kept structurally apart — the tables that hold them are not connected to each other, in either direction.

Actions staff take that matter are written to an audit log which, like the other permanent records here, cannot be edited or deleted by anybody, including us. That includes every occasion a staff member opens the private working parts of somebody's account, every change a member of staff makes to an athlete's working parts while signed in as them, and every occasion a paid feature is switched on or off by hand.

10What college coaches can see

A coach reaches the platform only after CheerForward staff have verified that they coach the program they say they coach. Until then their account can see no athlete at all.

A verified coach can search athletes whose accounts are active and can see, for each one: name, high school, hometown, graduation year, height and the date CheerForward staff measured it if they have, the positions they compete at, academics if entered, badges, what each one is for and any note staff wrote when awarding it, published scouting reports, the profile photo and videos on their profile and any highlight video link, and their rating — and, for a college transfer, that they are transferring, the college they attend or last attended, its level, how many college cheer seasons they have completed, and the year they would start at a new school. They can send a message, and they can keep private notes about an athlete on their own recruiting board.

A coach never sees your date of birth and never sees your email address. Neither field exists in the view that coach-facing searches read, so this is a property of the data model rather than a promise about a screen.

A coach never sees which schools you have saved, what you told us you are looking for, your fit percentage for their program, or your notes. No coach sees any of that, including a coach at a school on your list. CheerForward staff can read it, for support, and every time they do it is logged — section 7 sets out how that works and what staff can and cannot do with it.

Notes a coach writes about you on their own board are private to that coach. You cannot see them, and neither can any other coach. CheerForward staff can read them, on the same terms and with the same logging as everything else in section 7. Whether an athlete should be able to see which programs are tracking them is a separate product question we have not answered, and we would rather write that down than imply it is settled.

Coaches can export their own recruiting board, which means information about you can leave the platform in a spreadsheet on a coach's computer. Once it has, it is under that program's control rather than ours. This is inherent to recruiting and we mention it because it is the most likely route by which your information ends up somewhere we cannot reach.

11Parents and guardians

An athlete may add one parent or guardian to their account by giving us that person's email address. We write to that address to tell them they have been added and what it means.

Adding a guardian is optional and nothing on the platform is gated on it. An athlete can create an account, complete their profile, be seen by coaches, message coaches and sign up for events without a guardian ever answering. This is a change from how the platform previously worked, and it is a deliberate decision by CheerForward.

A guardian who is on an account can read every conversation that athlete has with a coach, see the athlete's profile, see the videos the athlete uploads, see the athlete's weekly challenges and the notes staff write on them, see what the athlete said they are looking for, see which steps of their recruiting checklist they have ticked, see any change the athlete has asked staff to make, and see the athlete's rating and badges. They receive an email when a coach messages the athlete.

A guardian can never send a message as the athlete, and there is no mechanism in the platform for them to do so.

Changing which guardian is on an account, or adding one after the fact, goes through CheerForward staff rather than being self-service, so that nobody can quietly swap out who is watching.

If you are a parent and believe your child has an account here that you should be on, write to recruiting@cheerforward.com and we will deal with it.

12Children's information

The minimum age for an account here is 13. We ask for a date of birth at signup and refuse to create an account below that age. We do not knowingly collect personal information from anybody under 13.

If we learn that we hold information about a child under 13, we delete the account and the information associated with it. If you believe a child under 13 has an account here, write to recruiting@cheerforward.com and we will act on it.

For athletes between 13 and 18, the platform is designed on the assumption that the account belongs to a minor: the date of birth never reaches a coach, the profile is not published until the athlete has accepted this policy, conversations with adults are readable by staff, and a guardian on the account reads along and cannot be removed by the athlete.

A parent or guardian may exercise any of the rights in the sections below on behalf of an athlete under 18 — including asking to see what we hold, asking us to correct it, and asking us to delete it.

13How a Vault Rating is produced

Ratings are scored by Vault evaluators against a fixed rubric, in person, at a combine or clinic. The same rubric is applied to every athlete. Our methodology page sets out what it measures and how a rating is produced; the component-by-component detail, including what each part of your own score was worth, is on your scorecard once you have been evaluated.

Only CheerForward staff can write a rating. Coaches cannot, and neither can you. A rating is a judgement about you made by people, published to coaches, and it is not appealable — you can ask to be re-evaluated, and you can file a change request about a measured field, but you cannot have a score you disagree with removed.

Every version of every rating is kept permanently and cannot be edited or deleted by anybody, including us. A score history that can be quietly rewritten is worth nothing, and that is the trade being made: the record is durable in your favour and against it equally.

Paying us does not change a score and cannot. A paid plan buys controls and services — a sorting option, whether a percentage is drawn on a row, a challenge tracker, an evaluator's feedback on your challenge videos — and no part of it reaches the arithmetic. A missing figure never lowers a score either: an absent measurement makes a rating incomplete, not bad.

Only CheerForward staff record your height, usually by measuring it in person at a combine or clinic. You cannot enter or change it yourself. Your height is not part of your rating, and it changes when staff measure it again rather than by a change request.

CheerForward staff may also award you badges. A badge is a judgement staff make from what they see in person: the skills you perform, how you work with the people around you, and, for a badge tied to a position, how you perform at that position and physical attributes such as height. A badge for a position is only awarded for a position you list. A badge is not part of your rating or your ranking, and staff can remove one. You, and a guardian on your account, see every badge a coach can see and what it is for.

14Payments

There is no card payment in Vault today. We do not collect, process or store card numbers, bank details or billing addresses anywhere in this platform, because there is nothing here that takes a payment. Paid plans are switched on by CheerForward staff by hand.

If that changes, payment processing will be handled by a specialist provider and card details will go to them rather than to us. We will update this policy and this section before any such thing is switched on, and the version at the top of the page will change.

15Service providers

We use a small number of providers to run the platform. Each one sees only what it needs to do its job, and each is bound by its own agreement with us to process that information on our instructions:

• Supabase — hosts the database, the authentication system, and the storage buckets that hold uploaded videos and profile photos. It therefore holds effectively everything listed in the collection sections above.
• Vercel — serves the website. It sees ordinary web request records: IP addresses, paths, timings, and response codes.
• Mapbox — answers the hometown and high-school search boxes, and draws the map of our gyms. Your browser never talks to Mapbox: the text you type is sent through our server, so Mapbox sees a partial place name arriving from a CheerForward address and nothing at all about who typed it. The gym map is one picture our server fetches for everyone, with nothing about you in the request.
• Email delivery — sends confirmation links, guardian notifications, message alerts, messages athletes write to coaches who are not on Vault yet, and platform notices, and therefore sees email addresses and the contents of those emails.

16Sharing data with anyone else — not finalised

This section is not finished. It is published in this state on purpose — we would rather show you a gap than a paragraph we made up. It needs review by our lawyers before it says anything definite.

This section is not finished, and we would rather say so than guess. It will set out whether CheerForward ever shares, licenses or sells personal information to anyone beyond the service providers listed above — for example to college programs in bulk, to camps and combines, to recruiting services, to data brokers, or to advertisers.

Until this section is completed and reviewed by our lawyers, treat the rest of this policy as the complete description of what happens to your information: you can see every party that receives it in the section above, and there is no other.

Because most people on this platform are under 18, any answer here carries specific legal obligations — including the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act for anyone under 13, and state privacy laws that treat minors' data differently from adults'. Several of those laws require opt-in consent before a minor's personal information may be sold or used for targeted advertising, and some prohibit it outright. We are not going to write a placeholder that sounds decisive.

If this question matters to your decision to use Vault — and it reasonably might — write to recruiting@cheerforward.com and ask where it stands. We will answer honestly rather than pointing you back at this page.

17Legal requests and safety

We may disclose information when the law requires it — in response to a subpoena, a court order, or a valid request from a law enforcement or regulatory authority — and when we believe in good faith that disclosure is necessary to prevent imminent harm to somebody.

The most likely real instance of this on a platform like ours is a safeguarding concern arising from something staff read in a conversation. If we see a credible risk to a young person we will act on it, which may include contacting a guardian, a school, a program, or the authorities, and we will not wait for permission to do so.

We may also disclose information as part of a merger, acquisition, financing or sale of assets, in which case the recipient would be bound by this policy or by one at least as protective, and we would tell you before your information became subject to a different policy.

18Where your information is held

The platform and its database are hosted in the United States. If you use it from outside the United States, your information is transferred to and stored in the United States, which may have different data protection rules than your own country.

Vault is built for United States college recruiting and we do not market it outside the United States. If you are in a jurisdiction with its own rules about international transfers and you want to know how we handle that, write to recruiting@cheerforward.com before creating an account.

19How long we keep things

While your account exists, we keep your profile, your profile photo and videos, your messages, your shortlist, your recruiting checklist, your preferences, your ratings and your weekly challenge history, because those are the account. Challenge videos are the exception: we delete the file a week after staff approve it or send it back, a week after a challenge is cancelled, within a day if you delete it yourself, and in any case within 30 days of upload. The challenge, its status and staff's notes on it stay with your account.

If you ask us to delete your account, we remove your profile, your uploaded videos, your profile photo, your weekly challenges and their history, your shortlist, your recruiting checklist, your saved searches, your preferences, your event sign-ups, and your conversations with coaches. Your consent records go with the account rather than outliving it: nobody can remove one while your account exists, including us, and deleting the account removes them along with everything else.

Two kinds of record survive a deletion, and you should know this before you agree to it rather than afterwards. Your rating history survives, and the log of what staff did survives. Neither can be edited or deleted by anybody, us included. The reason is that both exist precisely to be permanent — a score history that could be quietly rewritten would be worth nothing, and an audit log that could be edited would not be an audit log.

Ordinary server logs and error reports age out on our providers' own schedules, which are measured in weeks rather than years. Backups are retained on a rolling basis and a deletion propagates through them as they roll over.

A coach's private notes about you, and any export they have already taken, are not ours to delete. See the section on what coaches can see.

20How we protect your information

Access rules are enforced in the database itself rather than only in the application, using row-level security. That distinction matters more than it sounds: it means a bug in a screen or an API route cannot hand somebody data they are not entitled to, because the database refuses the read regardless of which code asked for it.

Concretely: athletes cannot read each other's records; coaches have no access at all to the athlete profile table and read a restricted view that has no date-of-birth column and no email column in it; a coach's board notes are readable only by that coach and, for support, by CheerForward staff; the permanent records cannot be rewritten by any account, including our own administrative one.

Traffic to the site is encrypted in transit. Passwords are stored hashed by our authentication provider and are not visible to us. Uploaded videos are held in a private storage bucket that is not publicly readable.

Staff access to the platform is through named accounts, and consequential actions are logged — including every occasion a member of staff signs in to somebody else's account, which is recorded against the staff member's own name.

No system is perfect, and we would rather describe what we have built than promise it is unbreakable. If we discover a breach affecting your information we will tell you, and where the law requires it we will tell the relevant authority.

If you find a security problem in this platform, tell us at recruiting@cheerforward.com rather than publishing it, and we will fix it.

21Your rights and choices

Whoever you are and wherever you are, you can do all of the following:

• See what we hold about you. Most of it is on your own screens; for the rest, ask us.
• Correct it. You can edit most of your profile yourself at any time.
• Delete your account, subject to the two permanent records described in the retention section.
• Ask a question about any of this and get a straight answer.

22The things you cannot change yourself, and why

Three things are deliberately not self-service, and the reasoning for each is different:

Your email address and your role cannot be changed from inside the platform. An email change that did not re-verify the new address would be an account takeover, and a self-service role change would let any account promote itself. Both go through staff.

Once CheerForward has evaluated you in person, GPA and class rank change by request through staff rather than by editing. Your height is different: only staff record it, and you cannot enter it, edit it or ask to change it, whether or not you have been rated. It changes when staff measure it again. If a verification could be edited away afterwards it would not mean anything.

You cannot remove a guardian from your own account, and a guardian cannot remove themselves. Adding a guardian is optional; removing one that exists goes through staff.

23State privacy rights in the United States

Several US states give residents specific rights over their personal information — among them California, Colorado, Connecticut, Virginia, Utah, Texas, Oregon and Montana, and the list grows most years. Depending on where you live, these can include the right to know what categories of personal information are collected and why, the right to a copy of it, the right to correct it, the right to have it deleted, the right to opt out of sale or targeted advertising, the right to limit the use of sensitive personal information, and the right not to be discriminated against for exercising any of them.

We extend all of these to everybody who uses the platform, regardless of which state they live in, because operating two standards would mean building the worse one first.

To exercise any of them, write to recruiting@cheerforward.com from the address on your account, or from a guardian address if you are asking on behalf of an athlete under 18. We will confirm we have received it, and we will not ask you to create an account or pay anything in order to make the request.

We do not use your information for targeted advertising and we do not serve advertising on this platform. Whether personal information is ever sold or shared for cross-context behavioural advertising is the question the unfinished section above covers, and until that section is completed the honest answer to give you is that it is not settled in writing.

You may appeal a decision we make about a request by replying to it. If you are in a state with an appeal right and we refuse your appeal, you may complain to your state Attorney General.

24Deleting your account

Write to recruiting@cheerforward.com from the address on the account and ask. A parent or guardian may ask on behalf of an athlete under 18.

We will confirm what will be removed and what will survive — the retention section above is the list — and then do it. Deletion is not reversible: the profile, the videos, the messages and the shortlist do not come back, and a new account starts from nothing.

Removing your account does not remove information a coach exported before you left, or anything you sent somebody outside the platform.

25Automated decisions and profiling

The platform ranks and filters. When you sort schools by best fit, they are ordered by a fit score computed from the preferences you gave us and your Vault Rating. Once you have a rating, schools whose competition record we can compare it with come first, and when two schools fit you equally, one CheerForward works with comes first. A school we have no information for on something you told us matters scores zero on it. Staff can set the lowest rating a squad is recommended to; below it, or before you have a rating, that squad is listed separately as a big reach rather than among your schools. Athletes are ordered for coaches by rating and by the filters a coach sets; a pipeline can be built from criteria a coach chooses, which places athletes on a coach's list automatically.

None of that is a decision about you made by a machine in the sense that data protection law is concerned with. Your rating — the number that actually matters here — is scored by a person against a fixed rubric, not by an algorithm, and no automated process on this platform changes it. Nobody's account is suspended, restricted or removed automatically; a person does that.

26Changes to this policy

This is version 2026-10-07. When we change it substantively we issue a new version and ask you to accept it again the next time you sign in. The version you accepted is recorded against your account with the date, so it is always possible to say which document you actually saw.

Being asked to accept a new version does not switch your account off in the meantime.

We will not make a change that materially reduces the protections described here and apply it silently to information we already hold.

27Governing law

CheerForward operates from the United States and this policy is written to United States law. Which state's law governs your use of the platform, and where any dispute would be heard, is set out in our terms of service rather than here — a privacy policy is not the right instrument for a choice of forum, and we would rather point you at the document that actually settles it than restate it inaccurately.

Nothing in this policy waives a right you have under a law that cannot be waived.

28How to contact us

Everything in this policy — a question, a correction, a deletion request, a complaint, a security report, or a request to see what we hold — goes to recruiting@cheerforward.com.

Write from the address on your account where you can, because it is the fastest way for us to be sure we are talking to the right person. If you are a parent or guardian asking on behalf of an athlete under 18, say so and tell us the athlete's name.

If something in this document is unclear, that is worth telling us too. A policy that is technically accurate and practically unreadable has failed at the only thing it is for.