First Use

Hey-Footy

A private chat for a football club, where no adult can message a child without the child’s parents in the conversation.

The problem we saw

Community football runs on group chats. Most clubs use a messaging app that was built for friends and families, not for a club with children in it. In those apps, any adult can start a private chat with any child. Nothing in the app stops it. The club cannot see it. The parents cannot see it.

Sport Integrity Australia’s guidance on digital communication is clear. A person in a position of authority must not have unsupervised one-to-one communication with a child. A parent, carer or authorised club representative must be in the conversation. Every club agrees with that rule. Few clubs have a tool that applies it.

So the rule lives in a policy document, and a volunteer coach or team manager carries the risk. A club that wants to do the right thing has to police a tool that was not designed for the job.

What the community needed

Clubs needed a chat where the safety rule is part of the software, not a document beside it. In practice that means:

  • A chat that is private to one club. No public profiles, no feeds, no way to search for people, no messages between clubs.
  • Parents in every conversation that involves their child. Not invited, not optional, but present by design.
  • Simple roles that a volunteer can understand. A title on a person is a label, not a permission.
  • A report button on every message, and evidence that survives edits and deletions.
  • Club data kept in Australia.

A general-purpose messaging app does none of these things. That is the gap Hey-Footy fills.

What Hey-Footy is

Hey-Footy is a private, club-controlled, real-time chat service for community football clubs. Each club gets its own copy of the app. Inside it, every team has a chat with its players, its coaches and the players’ approved parents. Adults in the club can message each other privately. Children under 13 get team chats only. From Under-13 teams up, a coach and a junior player can have a supervised feedback chat. Every one of that child’s approved parents is in it automatically and can read all of it. Anything you can see, you can report with one tap.

Hey-Footy is not a social network. There are no public profiles, no feeds, no followers, no messaging between clubs, no private chat between children, and nothing trained on anyone’s messages.

How we built the safety in

Five rules shaped every decision.

  1. The server checks every rule. Each time someone sends, uploads, reacts, opens a room or searches, the server checks the rule again. A guessed web address or an old invitation hits the same wall as a button.
  2. No unsupervised adult-to-child channel can exist. Not by invitation, not by a change of role, not by an old room. If parent cover is lost, posting stops.
  3. A role is not access. A club admin does not get a team’s history. A safeguarding officer sees reported items only. Access comes from being on the team now, or from being an approved parent now.
  4. Evidence survives everything. A reported message is copied into a locked store with its own copies of any files. Edits and deletions cannot reach that copy.
  5. Keep it simple. Four roles, two tick-boxes, five kinds of conversation. Complicated rules are where safety bugs hide.

Where it is now

Hey-Footy is under development. We test it with made-up data only. No child will use it before independent security testing, a privacy and online-safety counsel review, and a football safeguarding review are complete. Adults will use it first. There is no launch date yet.

In the meantime, the Coaching Diagram is free and ready to use.

Hey-Footy is a chat tool. It supports a club’s safeguarding duties. It does not replace them.