MatRecruit Children's Privacy Policy (COPPA)

Effective date: 2026-06-14 Last updated: 2026-06-19

MatRecruit is operated by Matside Wrestling Co. ("Matside," "we," "us," or "our"). This Children's Privacy Policy explains how we handle information about children under the age of 13 in accordance with the U.S. Children's Online Privacy Protection Act ("COPPA"). It is a companion to our general Privacy Policy and our Support Policy.

If you are a parent or legal guardian and you have questions about your child's information on MatRecruit — including how to confirm whether your child has an account, how to delete it, and how to request information we may have collected — contact us at support@matside.org.

1. Operator and contact information

The operator of MatRecruit, and the entity responsible for handling children's information under COPPA, is:

Matside Wrestling Co. 10685-B Hazelhurst Dr. # 43104 Houston, TX 77043 USA Email: support@matside.org

A parent or legal guardian may contact us at the email address above for any matter relating to a child's information on MatRecruit.

2. Why this policy exists

MatRecruit is a recruiting platform built for high-school wrestlers in an active recruiting window — typically 13 through 19 years old. The platform is designed so that children under 13 should not have accounts. This policy explains, in plain language, the boundary we draw at age 13, how we enforce it, and what we do if a child under 13 ends up on the platform anyway.

3. MatRecruit is not for children under 13

MatRecruit is not directed to children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from children under 13.

When a user creates a MatRecruit account, the registration flow requires the user to identify a high-school graduation year in an active recruiting window. The window is calculated from the current year and covers:

Grades 9 through 12 — the active high-school years (typically ages 14–18)
Up to four years ahead of the current senior year — so a rising 8th grader entering 9th grade can build a profile (typically age 13 or 14 entering 9th grade)
Up to two years behind the current senior year — covering gray-shirt athletes (graduated last year, at a prep school) and JUCO year-2 transfers (graduated two years ago)

A graduation year outside this window is rejected at registration. The earliest-eligible class corresponds to a wrestler who is 13 or 14 entering 9th grade; the structural exclusion of under-13 users follows from this window calculation. The boundary is enforced on every account that is created and again whenever the graduation year on an account changes.

A note on framing. The registration flow is framed positively around eligibility ("MatRecruit is for high-school wrestlers") rather than as a minimum-age-negative gate ("You must be 13 or older — enter your birthdate"). This is intentional. A minimum-age-negative gate prompts an under-13 user to lie about their age to gain access; an eligibility-positive frame does not. The product copy at signup and the rejection messages returned by the gate both use eligibility-positive framing.

4. What happens if we learn a child under 13 has an account

If we learn — through a parent or guardian's report, through a user's own disclosure, or through any other reliable source — that a child under 13 has registered for or is using a MatRecruit account, we will:

Disable the account so that it cannot be used.
Delete the account record and the associated profile, photo, accolades, coaches, schedule, highlights, social links, and recruiting tracker data, in accordance with our general retention policy described in our Privacy Policy.
Refund any subscription charges that have been processed against the account. MatRecruit subscriptions are billed by Stripe; refunds are processed through Stripe and credited to the original payment method.
Confirm to the parent or guardian, at the email address they used to contact us, that the account has been deleted and any subscription charges have been refunded.

A parent or legal guardian who believes their child under 13 has registered may contact us at support@matside.org to request deletion. Please include the email address used to create the account so that we can locate it.

5. We do not condition participation on disclosure of more information than is reasonably necessary

A child who reaches MatRecruit and is rejected at registration because of an out-of-window graduation year does not need to provide any additional information to us. We do not "require" disclosure of identifying information from a person we are turning away.

6. Information we may incidentally collect before we can identify a user as under 13

If a child under 13 begins the MatRecruit registration flow before the graduation-year check rejects them, the only information we may have received is:

An email address provided to start sign-in
Basic technical information automatically collected by our web stack (browser type, device type, IP-derived approximate location)

If we identify the account as belonging to a child under 13 — either because the user discloses it, a parent reports it, or our checks catch it — the email is associated with the account record we are deleting, and the technical signals are subject to the retention schedules described in our Privacy Policy.

We do not knowingly retain a child's identifying information any longer than is necessary to delete the account and notify the parent or guardian.

7. Disclosure of children's information

Because we do not knowingly serve users under 13, we do not knowingly share children's personal information with any third party for any purpose other than the deletion process described in §4 above.

In particular, we do not share children's information for advertising, marketing, or commercial profiling.

8. Parental rights

Under COPPA, a parent or legal guardian of a child under 13 has the right to:

Review any personal information we may have collected from their child
Request deletion of that information
Refuse further collection of the child's information

You can exercise any of these rights by contacting us at support@matside.org. We will work with you to verify your relationship to the child and respond promptly.

9. Public profile pages and children under 13

MatRecruit allows account holders to publish a public profile page (described in our general Privacy Policy, §4). Because account holders are restricted to wrestlers in an active high-school recruiting window, a public profile page should not exist for a child under 13. If a public page does exist and is reported to us as belonging to a child under 13, we will unpublish it immediately, in addition to taking the deletion steps in §4.

10. Changes to this policy

We may update this Children's Privacy Policy from time to time. When we do, we will update the "Effective date" and "Last updated" lines at the top of the document. Material changes will be noted in-product or by email to the parent or guardian who has previously contacted us about a child.

11. Contact

If you are a parent or guardian and you have questions about a child's information on MatRecruit, contact us at:

Matside Wrestling Co. 10685-B Hazelhurst Dr. # 43104 Houston, TX 77043 USA Email: support@matside.org