Every company says it began with a spark.
Ours has a date.

Summer 2021, a local tournament. Our founder's daughter, tennis bag nearly bigger than she was, met a young professional named Emma Raducanu. Two months later the family watched that same player win the US Open from the qualifying rounds. Something caught that afternoon and never went out.

She asked the question every parent of a dreamer eventually hears: "Can I do that?" Her dad's answer is still the whole company: "You can try, and we'll support you the whole way."

Who builds it

TierBreak is built by Thomas House, a tennis dad with twenty-five years in technology and cybersecurity, and it started the way these things do: he kept track. Years of spreadsheets, scripts, and kitchen-table tools, refined at fences and in parking lots, because junior tennis turned out to be a maze handed to families with no map. Tournaments, ratings, development, the mental game. He talked to coaches, parents, and players, and tried every app, site, and template out there. Everything that mattered was disconnected, too public, or too careless with a child's data for a security professional to accept. Nothing could answer the question he and his wife asked each other on the drive home: are we doing right by her?

Then the turn. When Anthropic released Claude Code, he handed it years of his homegrown tools and asked: what's wrong with these? Then: fix them. In months, working with Claude as a build partner, the kitchen-table project became a real platform. That is not a detail we hide; it is part of who we are. A builder, his daughter's journey, and a new way of building, in the open. TierBreak LLC is a Pennsylvania company. It is a personal venture, funded by its founder, with no outside investors.

Three promises

• To the athlete: proof they are getting better, measured against their own former self, never a leaderboard. Seeing your own climb is what keeps a kid motivated and in the game.
• To the parent: not more data, a better way to be the person at the fence. What to say, when to say nothing, and how to watch the journey instead of managing it.
• To the coach: the week they did not see, in the terms a coach can act on in the very next lesson.

Two refusals

The family owns the data. No ads, no tracking, no selling a child's information. Family-entered, family-owned, and nothing about a junior player collected from anywhere the family did not choose. How that is kept is written down on the Trust page and in the privacy policy.

Evidence over hype. Every number comes from the athlete's own points, and when the evidence is thin, the software says so rather than inventing certainty.

Where we are

TierBreak is not yet in the App Store. A small group of families and coaches, the Inner Circle, uses it free and tells us the truth about what works. Families who want in can apply here; everyone else can join the launch list. We write about what we are building on the blog, and you can reach a human at support@tierbreak.app.

The pros have teams. Junior tennis families get a folding chair and a long drive home. We are building the team that fits in a family's pocket.