One place to think
that no one is grading.
Every serious athlete needs somewhere to be honest: about a loss, a fear, a bad week, a doubt they'd never say out loud. That only works if it's truly private. So the journal in TierBreak is governed by a covenant, not a setting. These promises don't change quietly, and they don't have an off switch we can flip later.
What a journal entry is
The written reflections your athlete keeps for themselves: the free-text they write, and the words inside a match reflection. Not the scores, ratings, or check-in numbers (those are structured data a parent always sees). The words.
The promises
About those words, we promise:
- They never train an AI model, and nothing automatic ever reads them. Journal text is never sent to Anthropic or any AI service for anything TierBreak does on its own. Two exceptions exist, and only you can trigger them. The opt-in Clean up with AI button on a photographed handwritten page sends that page to Anthropic to be transcribed, because plain text-recognition mangles real handwriting. The transcription comes straight back to you; TierBreak never stores the photo, the text is never used to train any model, and TierBreak keeps only the version you approve. And the Your patterns reading (added 2026-08-06) sends your own recent reflections, never a parent's notes, to Anthropic to have their themes read back to you, and to no one else. It never runs on its own, a parent or coach can neither trigger it nor see the result, it works only for an athlete whose AI features are switched on, and the text is never used to train any model. Ask for it, or it never happens. For an athlete under 13 it never happens at all: AI features are switched off for them entirely while the rules for children and AI are still settling.
- They stay the athlete's, until the athlete chooses otherwise, from 13.
A parent sees that an entry exists, never what it says, unless the athlete shares
it. A coach sees a reflection only if the athlete shares it with that specific
coach, entry by entry, and never sees one shared with a different coach.
Under 13 this promise does not apply, and we will not pretend it does. A guardian has the right to review what their child has written; the child cannot sign that away and neither can we. So for an athlete under 13 the words are always visible to their guardian, and the app never tells them otherwise. We would rather say this plainly than let a ten-year-old believe in a privacy we are not able to give them. Turning 13 changes nothing on its own: a guardian is shown exactly what would change and has to agree to it before anything does.
- They never enter a résumé or an export you trigger. The Training Résumé and every data export a parent runs are built to leave the journal words out by construction.
- They never survive deletion. Delete the entry, the profile, or the account, and the words are erased, not archived, not kept "for analytics."
- They never touch a partner deal. No partner, rating body, or third party ever receives journal text. The scopes that could even carry it are switched off and stay off: permanently, not "for now."
- Safety works around them, never through them. If something written suggests the athlete may be struggling, we nudge a guardian to check in without ever showing the words. Care, not surveillance.
Why we bind our own hands
A private corpus of a child's honest reflection is exactly the kind of thing a company could someday be tempted to mine, or a buyer could someday want. The covenant exists so that temptation has no door. The value of this space is that it is not monetized, and the only way to promise that credibly is to promise it publicly, in writing, permanently.
This covenant is versioned and pinned to the privacy-policy version recorded in your family's consent ledger. It can be strengthened; it is not weakened silently. Any change is a dated, public entry that names what changed and why. See how we protect the whole journey →