Safeguarding You

Safeguarding You: A Custom SaaS Platform For Incident Reporting and Risk Management in Youth Sports

Industry

Sports

Type

Web application

Main technologies

Scala, JavaScript

Engagement model

Full-cycle development

Length of cooperation

2019-ongoing

Summary

SysGears developed Safeguarding You — a versatile SaaS platform that helps youth sports organizations stay compliant with child safe standards, accurately address incidents, and report them on time. A clear, user-friendly UI and cloud-based backend make the solution easy to adopt for a broad audience and ready to scale beyond youth sports.

About Our Client

Safeguarding You is a project that aims to make youth sports a safe, inclusive, and empowering environment for players, coaches, parents, and club employees. The client has been partnering with SysGears since 2019, when we built their first product, CertifiedBy.

The Challenge:

Streamlining Incident Reporting, Governance, and Compliance In Youth Sports

As child safety and concussion management are strictly regulated under Australian law, timely incident reporting is mandatory, and mistakes or gaps can lead to reputational damage and legal repercussions. In the face of this challenge, the client came up with the idea to create a unified digital environment for compliance and incident management in youth sports. The solution is intended to:

Reduce paperwork by automating reporting workflows and centralizing document storage.
Improve club governance through tailored compliance assessment programs and subsequent issue remediation.
Enhance child safety monitoring by standardizing reports, tracking remediation activities, and forecasting risks.

Tech Lead’s Take On the Project

The client came to us with an existing platform that didn’t satisfy their business and technical needs. Our main goal was to help the client enter a new market niche by modernizing their existing software and expanding its functionality. To achieve this, we upgraded the technology stack, optimized performance, and added new features that improved the product’s market fit.

Full-Cycle Development Services To Build a Market-Ready Web Solution For Youth Sports Safety

IT Consulting

We provide ongoing IT consulting services, helping the client turn their business ideas into viable technology solutions. The project’s tech lead carefully analyzes every request, clarifies requirements, and helps the client assess the cost-benefit ratio of each change. By working closely with the client, we ensure every modification is relevant and cost-efficient.

Software Modernization

An outdated technology stack was among the key challenges impeding the platform’s scalability, performance, and business relevance. To solve those issues, our engineers suggested migrating the legacy MVC application to a modern SPA architecture. We also rebuilt the UI to make it more functional and lightweight, which significantly boosted the client’s marketing efforts. We revamped the solution’s infrastructure and optimized its performance, substantially reducing operational costs.

UI/UX Design

We implemented a simple, straightforward design that works for everyone — sports club employees, league representatives, and even regular match viewers who can submit anonymous reports. To enhance user experience, we added convenient task management dashboards with progress bars and customizable filters. As the platform’s capabilities are really broad, we also introduced hover tooltips that simplify user onboarding and speed up task completion.

Incremental Software Development

As the client’s business evolves, our team continuously expands the platform with new functionality and user flows. Well-structured feedback loops help us quickly respond to changes in child safe standards, prioritize features, improve product usability, and thus minimize the risk of costly mistakes.

SysGears Offered The Client Flexible Collaboration Terms

Flexibility and trust lay a firm foundation for our long-term cooperation with the client. We have agreed on an adaptable collaboration model that allows the client to regulate the project path based on the available resources. We scale the team up and down as needed, achieving business objectives without overspending.

Key Business Features That Power Safeguarding You

Risk and Compliance Assessment

The platform offers custom questionnaires, enabling junior sports clubs to evaluate their compliance with the committee governance rules, child safety regulations, and concussion management guidelines. As a result, they receive a detailed risk report and improvement recommendations supported by an extensive, built-in knowledge base.

Automated Report Generation

Relying on Apache PDFBox, the platform automatically generates a risk report both upon assessment completion and at any time on client’s request, enabling continuous progress tracking. The findings are presented in graphs and charts that highlight problem areas, encouraging the users to proceed with follow-up remediation and review services.

Action Management

Users dissatisfied with their final risk score can order a review and receive practical improvement advice along with a tailored list of helpful resources. To make the remediation process more effective, we equipped the solution with a dashboard that visualizes progress and a task manager to track completed and pending actions.

Incident Management

Safeguarding You enables documenting, addressing, and resolving sports-related incidents — from injuries to child safeguarding issues. We crafted comprehensive incident report forms capturing key details such as incident type, date, breached policies, and people involved. A process dashboard, file attachments, and an opportunity to share reports via links make incident handling structured, accurate, and transparent.

Concussion Assessment

The platform offers separate functionality for managing concussions in youth sports — without extra paperwork and in line with the latest concussion guidelines. We created a separate report form for concussion risk assessment, enabling coaches and parents to recognize concussion signs early, provide timely treatment, properly estimate return-to-play time, and minimize legal risks.

No-Authentication Reporting

Safeguarding You allows everyone present at the match to report incidents anonymously, without creating an account or signing in. We introduced a convenient QR-code-based system that generates a unique QR for each match, ensuring the reports are valid and spam-free.

Our Technical Solutions For a Seamless Incident Management Experience Across All User Roles

Document Management

All regulatory documents are securely stored in one place and can be accessed through role-based authorization.

Content Management

Administrators can create, edit, and publish compliance assessment programs to meet new requirements and guidelines.

Task Management

Convenient task dashboards enable users to track pending and completed actions, minimizing gaps during compliance assessments and reporting.

Payment Gateway Integration

Integration with PayPal allows for secure payments, ensuring that all client data and transaction details are reliably protected.

Role Management

The administrators can create access rules and assign users to groups with different access levels so that sensitive data reaches only the right hands.

Main Outcomes For Business

To date, more than 15 junior football clubs in Australia use the platform for incident reporting.

In the near future, the solution will be rolled out at the league level.

Key Engineering Achievements

Reduced expenses: we revamped existing infrastructure setup based on the project’s actual needs and established a dedicated test environment, which drastically reduced infrastructure costs.
Better performance: performance optimization improved software stability and made the solution production-ready.
Improved UI/UX: optimized design significantly improved the platform’s usability and helped the client increase their customer base.
Enhanced security: by leveraging GCP Cloud Armor and upgrading the front-end stack, we protected the application against various threats, including DDoS, SQL injection, and malicious bot attacks.
Faster time to market: we have built a CI/CD pipeline that streamlines the development process and accelerates releases.

Clutch

5.0

“We came to SysGears with a semi-MVP. Now, we have an enterprise grade SaaS application that solves governance, risk and compliance problems for organisations around the world. It couldn’t have happened without SysGears’ support.”