If you work in the sport industry, you will have heard the term safe sport grow in popularity in the past few years. If you work for a sport organization you know that safe sport considerations should be made in every factor of your organizations.

This post will not cover every factor of safe sport. Rather, it will focus on one important journey, the athlete registration. We will look at athlete registration as it applies to a sport organization, a local sports club or a mass-participation event. 

If you want to see the big picture visit our post here to explore the ecosystem of safe sport. 

In this post, we will break down an athlete’s registration journey step by step, highlighting the procedures and processes that must take place to ensure a safe sport environment. While Interpodia’s membership management technology includes all of these processes, this list will be helpful to check against no matter what software or system your organization uses. 

So let’s get started!

During athlete registration, the first thing our technology does (and yours should too) is detect the age, language and location of the person registering.

Why is this important?

• Age of Majority

You need to know if you are registering a minor or an adult at the time of signing (not at the date of the event)

• Location

Different countries,regions, and provinces have different definitions of a minor.  You need to follow the rules for the region or province they are registering in.

• Language

We live in a highly diverse world! Did you know that you need to provide your waiver in the athlete’s language? If they sign a waiver they do not understand, it may not hold up in court. That’s why it’s important for your system to be able to support multiple languages.

Use cases involving third parties and minors include:

1. A coach registering their athletes.
2. A parent registering themselves and their kids.
3. An athlete registering themselves and their spouse.
4. A parent registering their kid and their kid’s friend.

In all of these cases, we want to remove friction for the athlete while ensuring the correct person or guardian is going to read and sign the demo. Our system manages this process during waiver signing by asking the following questions:

“Are you (name of athlete registering)?”

Or in the case of a minor…

“Are you (name of athlete registering)’s guardian?”

If they hit yes, they sign their waiver, check out and are an approved member/registrant.

If they hit no, then they bypass the waiver step, but are allowed to continue in the registration process to finish their transaction.

However, those third party adults or minors will have a pending membership or registration until the guardians open the email that was sent to them and signs their waiver. 

This process keeps things streamlined for the adult when they are registering themselves and other athletes and minors. It also ensures the correct person is signing the waiver.

The process of Waiver collection and management is a sensitive business, and one your insurer will want to see is as water-tight as possible. 

As a sport organization, it is important that you have quick and direct access to all of your athlete’s waivers. This means a process must be in place so that if an individual signs a waiver for a triathlon club, the national body for that club also has direct access to this waiver.

It is also important to insurers that you are able to provide an EXACT copy of a waiver as it was at the time of signing. Waiver content tends to change throughout the years as  additions and amendments are added. To fulfill this requirement, our system takes a screenshot of the waiver at the exact time of signing with a timestamp.

There should also be systems in place where a unique identifier (most commonly an email address) is used to ensure there are no duplicate members in your system.

Our system accomplishes this by detecting similarities in first and last name, email address, and date of birth at the time of registration.

If you are about to register someone, and they already have an account, our system will detect that the member may already have registered and it will stop you. This will occur even if you use a different name, like Jenny instead of Jennifer.

Is it one of these people:

j___8@gmail.com?

j__243@gmail.com?

jns_62@gmail.com?

This way your organization will have a view of all your athletes including their registrations, information, athlete data etc. This will allow for cleaner and more accurate reporting for governing bodies, funders etc.,

Whether you use a sport management software like ours or run these procedures manually, it is important to have processes in place for each of these steps in order to protect your athletes long-term development and reduce risk for your sport organization.