Terms of service

1. Who we are, and what this covers

MeetDirector Online (“the service”, “we”, “us”) is operated by Sports Timing, Inc. of 3537 Ashwycke Street, Mount Pleasant, SC 29466. These terms cover your use of the website at meetdirector.online and the accounts, portals and tools on it. By creating an account or using the service you agree to them.

If you are using the service on behalf of a club, school, league or timing business, you confirm you are allowed to agree to these terms for them, and “you” means both you and that organization.

2. Your account

• You need an account for most things beyond reading published results. Give accurate details and keep them up to date.
• Keep your password to yourself. Anything done through your account is treated as done by you, so tell us promptly if you think someone else has got into it.
• You may sign in with an email address and password, or with a Google, Microsoft or Apple account. We do not receive your password from those providers.
• Roles — coach, meet director, timing vendor, organization administrator — are granted by us or by the club or organization responsible, and can be withdrawn by them.
• Swimmers under 18 do not create their own accounts. A parent or guardian links to a swimmer through an invitation we send them, and holds the account relationship. See section 5.

3. What the service does

The service hosts swim meet information: meets and their events, team entries, results and times, rankings, records and time standards, and portals for coaches, swimmers, parents and timing vendors. Some meets and features are only available to organizations we have enabled them for.

We may change, add or remove features. Where a change removes something you rely on, we will give reasonable notice if we can.

4. Results, entries, and what is published

Swimming results are public. That is what the service is for. When a meet's results are imported or published, the swims in them — swimmer name, age, team, event, time, place — appear on the public parts of the site, including meet result pages, rankings and records.

Some things are never published:

• A swimmer's date of birth. Their age at the time of a swim is shown; the date is not.
• USA Swimming registration numbers.
• Email addresses and phone numbers, unless someone has chosen to publish theirs — for example a coach listing a contact address on a club page.
• Anything in a swimmer's private journal or goals, which reach other people only if the swimmer shares them.

A swimmer or their guardian can ask for their name to be withheld from the public site. The swim still counts for places, scoring, records and rankings — it is shown without identifying them. Ask us through support.

If you upload a results or entries file, you confirm you are entitled to share the information in it with us and to have it published as described above. Results files usually contain every club at a meet, not only yours; when you upload one we tell the other clubs it affects that you did.

5. Swimmers under 18

Much of the information here is about children, and we treat it that way.

• A parent or guardian must be the one to link to a swimmer under 18, and can unlink at any time.
• Where a swimmer under 18 shares goals or a journal outside their own account, a guardian has to confirm it by a code we email them.
• We do not open support sessions on an account belonging to a swimmer under 18. Where such an account needs help, we work with their parent or guardian.
• If you believe we hold information about a child that should not be here, tell us and we will deal with it promptly.

6. Your information

How we handle information, in detail, is in our privacy policy. This section is a summary of it, not a substitute.

We hold the information you give us and the information in the meet files uploaded to us, and we use it to run the service: to publish results, to run entries and payments, and to help you when you ask. We send email through a third-party provider, and we take card payments through Stripe — we do not store card numbers ourselves.

You can ask us what we hold about you, ask us to correct it, or ask us to delete it, at support@meetdirector.online. Some things we cannot delete on request: results of a swim that took place are part of the record of a meet, and the logs described in section 9 exist precisely so that they cannot be quietly removed.

7. Fees

Reading results and having an account are free. Some things are charged for:

• Meet entries. Where a host charges entry fees, you pay them through the service. Entry fees are set by the host, not by us, and questions about the amount are for the host. Refunds are the host's decision. [CONFIRM: does the platform take a fee or percentage on entries? If so it must be stated here.]
• Timing vendors. A vendor account is free, and charged per entry processed at the rate shown when the vendor signed up. Charges are taken from the card the vendor keeps on file, after a meet's entries close.

[REFUND AND CANCELLATION TERMS — required, and likely required by consumer law wherever you trade.]

8. Using the service properly

Do not:

• Upload information you are not entitled to share, or claim a club, team or swimmer you have no connection to.
• Try to reach parts of the service you have not been given access to, or another person's account.
• Scrape, bulk-download or republish the site's data at scale, or use it to build a competing database.
• Interfere with the service, or use it to send anything unlawful, abusive or harmful.

We can suspend or close an account that does these things, or that puts swimmers at risk. Where we can, we will tell you why first.

9. Support access to your account

If you ask us for help, a member of our support staff may need to see your account as you see it in order to diagnose the problem. We will do this only with your permission, and only as follows.

We ask first, every time. We will email you a request naming the support ticket it relates to, the member of staff making it, and the reason they have given. A session cannot begin unless you allow it. Permission applies to one session only; a later session requires a fresh request. You may decline, and you do not have to give a reason.

Support can look, and cannot act. During a session our staff can see the pages and information that you can see. They cannot change anything in your account, cannot make entries, payments or submissions on your behalf, cannot change your password, email address or sign-in methods, and cannot download copies of your files. They cannot read anything you have kept private, including a swimmer's journal.

Sessions are short and you control them. A session ends automatically after 30 minutes, and cannot run longer than two hours in total. You can end it at any moment from your account page. We will email you when a session begins and again when it ends.

We keep a record and you can see it. Every page our staff open during a session is recorded, together with anything they were refused. We keep that record for at least two years, and you can read the record of any session run on your account at any time.

Accounts belonging to under-18s. We do not open support sessions on an account belonging to a swimmer under 18. Where such an account needs support, we work with their parent or guardian.

Who can do this. Support sessions can only be started by our system administrators, and by administrators of a governing organization in respect of accounts within their own organization.

A plain-language summary of this section.

10. Availability

We work to keep the service available, particularly on meet days, but we do not promise it will be uninterrupted. We may take it down for maintenance, and will avoid meet days where we can. [CONFIRM: do you want to offer any uptime commitment to paying hosts or vendors? Offering none is a reasonable position; saying nothing at all is not.]

11. Ending it

You can stop using the service and ask us to close your account at any time. We may close or suspend an account for a serious or repeated breach of section 8, or if we have to for legal or safety reasons.

Closing an account does not remove published results of swims that took place: those are part of the record of a meet and of other people's results too.

12. Liability

[LIABILITY AND WARRANTY WORDING — this needs a lawyer. It is the section most likely to be tested, the one where a template borrowed from another jurisdiction is most likely to be unenforceable, and the one I am least able to draft responsibly. Points to cover: the service is provided as it is; results and times are only as accurate as the files supplied to us; we are not responsible for a host's decisions about entries, seeding or refunds; limits on liability, and what cannot be limited.]

13. Changes to these terms

We may update these terms. If a change materially affects you we will tell you — by email or a notice on the site — before it takes effect. Continuing to use the service after that means you accept the updated terms.

14. Law and disputes

These terms, and any dispute about them or about your use of the service, are governed by the law of the State of South Carolina, without regard to its conflict-of-laws rules. The state and federal courts sitting in Charleston County, South Carolina are where such a dispute is heard, and both you and we agree to that.

Nothing here takes away a right you have under the consumer-protection law that applies to you and that these terms cannot override.

15. Contact

Questions about these terms, or anything else: support.meetdirector.online, support@meetdirector.online, 843-628-5486, or Sports Timing, Inc., 3537 Ashwycke Street, Mount Pleasant, SC 29466.

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Related: When support looks at your account.