Privacy Policy

Quick answer: Tennis Ladder collects only what's needed to run club ladders — your name, email, optional phone/ratings, and your match records. If you choose to attach a watch workout to a match, that health summary is stored with your explicit consent, stays private to you by default, and you can delete it at any time. Nothing is sold or used for marketing. For privacy queries or to exercise your rights, contact support or your club organiser.

Who we are

Tennis Ladder (tennisladder.co.uk) is the platform your tennis club uses to run its ladders and leagues. For each club's ladder, the club is the data controller and Tennis Ladder processes data on its behalf. For platform-level queries, use the in-app support chat or the contact details in the app footer.

What we collect

• Your name and email address
• Your doubles partner's name/email (if you enter them)
• An optional phone number
• Optional LTA/WTN/UTR ratings you choose to add
• Your match records — results, scores, challenges and ladder position
• Optionally, a workout summary you choose to attach to a match — see Health & workout data below

For under-16s we collect a parent/guardian's contact details instead of the child's.

For junior members we also collect the player's date of birth, given by the parent/guardian at sign-up. It is used solely to verify age, apply age-appropriate protections (including the age from which match chat can be used without guardian consent), and automatically remove junior protections at 18. It is never displayed in the app or shared with other members.

Why, and our lawful basis

We process this data on the basis of the club's legitimate interests in running its ladder — displaying standings, letting members arrange and confirm matches, and sending match-related notifications (challenges, result confirmations and activity reminders). We don't use your data for marketing.

Who can see it

• League tables and results (names, positions and scores) of a club's public leagues are visible to anyone with the link. A club can make any league private, in which case only its members can see it.
• Email addresses and phone numbers are never shown publicly, nor in member lists. A member's contact details are released only to a signed-in member who plays in the same league (so you can arrange matches), and to the organisers of that league. Anyone else — including people from other clubs — can't see them.
• Juniors: to anyone outside the club a junior appears only as "Junior player", with no name or photo. Junior leagues are visible only to approved members of that league and organisers. Anyone arranging a match with a junior is given the parent/guardian's contact details, never the child's, and messages about a child go to the parent/guardian.
• You can hide yourself from your club's player directory in Settings.

UTR connection (optional)

If you choose to connect your UTR Sports account, we store an encrypted access token and a cached copy of your UTR rating to display it. You can disconnect at any time, which removes the token.

Health & workout data (optional)

If you use the watch features, you can attach the workout you recorded during a match to your result. Health data is special category data under UK GDPR, so it gets stricter treatment than everything else:

• Lawful basis: your explicit consent (UK GDPR Article 9(2)(a)). Nothing is read until you grant permission in Apple Health or Health Connect, and nothing is stored until you choose to attach a workout to a specific match. You can withdraw consent at any time — revoke the app's access in your phone's health settings, and remove any attached workout with one tap.
• Health Connect (Android). On Android the app requests one read-only Health Connect permission — exercise sessions — used for a single purpose: finding the tennis workout you recorded around a match you played and, if you choose, attaching its summary to your own match result so you can see your own fitness data in the context of your sport. We never write to Health Connect, never read in the background, never access other data types, and never use Health Connect data for advertising, marketing, profiling, rankings or any decision-making. Health Connect data is retained only while the attachment exists: detach the workout, delete the match, or delete your account and it is deleted from our servers.
• What we store, per attached match: duration, active calories, average and peak heart rate, a compressed heart-rate curve (at most 64 points), and the name of the recording device. Nothing else. Readings shown on the watch itself — sleep, heart-rate variability, blood oxygen and similar — are read from your device on your device and are never uploaded to our servers.
• Private by default. An attached workout is visible only to you. Adults can choose to share a match's summary with their club per match, and can unshare it again at any time. Junior players' health data can never be shared — this is enforced on our servers regardless of what a device requests.
• Never used for anything else. Health data never affects ratings, points or ladder positions, is never used for marketing or profiling, and is never shared with or sold to third parties.
• Deletion. Removing an attached workout deletes it. Deleting your account deletes all of your health data with it.
• Data is encrypted in transit (TLS) and at rest (Cloudflare's storage encryption).

Where your data is stored, and how it's protected

• Database and app: Cloudflare, with the database running in Cloudflare's Western Europe region. Encrypted in transit (TLS) and at rest.
• Backups: an encrypted copy of the database is taken every night and kept for 14 days on our own server in London (Oracle Cloud, UK South), then deleted.
• Help desk, newsletters and analytics: self-hosted on that same London server — not third-party services. Our analytics are cookie-free and don't track individuals.
• Access to member data is limited to the Tennis Ladder team and, for their own club, its organisers.

Sharing & processors

We never sell or share your data with third parties for their own purposes. We use these service providers purely to run the app; they process data only on our instructions:

Where a provider processes data outside the UK (for example Mailgun in the US), it does so under the safeguards UK data protection law requires, such as the UK–US Data Bridge or standard contractual clauses in the provider's data processing terms.

Retention

We keep your data while you're an active participant and delete it on request or when you leave the ladder. You can delete your account yourself in the app (Settings), which deletes your data; it then drops out of our backups within 14 days. Attached workout data is kept until you remove it or delete your account, whichever comes first.

Your rights

Under UK GDPR you have the right to access, rectify, erase, restrict or object to processing of your data, and to data portability. To exercise any of these, contact your club organiser or platform support. You also have the right to complain to the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) at ico.org.uk.

See also: Cookie Policy, GDPR & Data Protection, Terms & Conditions.