Privacy Policy

Tough Leaders Academy LLC

Effective: October 16, 2026

The short version

Our products are for adults: coaches and parents. We don't open accounts for, sell to or market to anyone under 18.
We don't collect personal information from athletes. What we hold about an athlete is limited to the fixed choices a parent picks in The Ride Home (never a name, school or contact details), plus two rare exceptions: a signed family recording release, and records we keep if someone raises a concern about a child's safety.
We never sell your information. We never share it for targeted advertising.
We never enter athletes' names or details into AI tools, and we never use AI to make decisions about an athlete. An AI assistant helps us sort email and draft replies. Mitch reads every reply before it goes out. We use AI providers under terms that don't allow them to train their models on our data.
You can unsubscribe from any email with one click. Write mitch@toughleadersacademy.com and we'll show you, fix or delete what we have. This applies to everyone, whatever state you live in.

The rest of this page gives the details.

1. Who we are

Tough Leaders Academy LLC ("TLA," "we," "us") is an Ohio limited liability company. We make leadership material for high school coaches and for parents of high school athletes. This policy covers our website, https://www.toughleadersacademy.com, our email lists, our landing pages and forms, our paid programs and our seminars.

Contact: mitch@toughleadersacademy.com, or Tough Leaders Academy LLC, 9891 Montgomery Road, PMB 181, Cincinnati, OH 45242.

2. What we collect, product by product

The Captain's Practice (free, for coaches)

When a coach signs up, we collect:

email address
first name
roster size
sport

We use this to send the twelve weekly sessions and related emails, and to write sessions that fit the sport and team size.

We never see, contact or collect anything about the athletes on the team. The coach runs each session under their own school's or club's policies. The Captain's Cards that athletes fill in stay with the coach. We never receive them.

We never import a parent contact list from a coach. If a coach forwards our parent letter, each parent decides for themselves whether to sign up.

The Ride Home (free, for parents)

In the five-question form, the parent gives us their first name and email, and picks from fixed choices:

which description sounds most like their athlete right now (for example, "quiet in the locker room" or "wants to lead, keeps getting passed over")
how the car ride home usually goes (silent, venting, an argument, or fine)
their athlete's sport
a confirmation that the athlete is 13 or older

We store these choices as labels ("tags") on the parent's email record in Kit, our email provider. The form does not ask for, and we do not keep, the athlete's name, exact age, school, team, photo or contact information. There is no free-text box about the athlete.

If you joined The Ride Home waitlist before the form opened, we hold only your first name and email address.

See section 4 for how we treat these choices.

Forge (paid, for parents)

When a parent buys Forge, we collect:

name
email address
what was bought (the Founding Season, a one-time purchase), when, and whether it was refunded

Stripe handles checkout, payment and refunds. Stripe collects your card details and billing information directly. We never see or store your full card number. We can see limited details Stripe shows sellers, such as the card brand, the last four digits, the expiration date and your billing country or postal code.

Forge is run by the parent. The athlete never needs an account or an email address, and we never contact the athlete. If Forge ever asks a parent to pick choices about their athlete's situation, we treat those choices exactly like Ride Home answers (section 4).

Seminars (paid, for teams)

Seminars are booked on request and confirmed in a short written agreement, often by email. To plan and bill a seminar we keep the organization's name, the organizer's name and contact details, the date, location and format, the group size, and the agreement and invoice.

Seminars are paid by invoice. You can pay by check, ACH bank transfer or card. If you pay by card through the link on the invoice, Stripe processes the payment and collects your card details directly. We never see or store the full card number. Check and bank transfer payments go through our business bank.

We don't collect names or other information about athletes who attend a seminar. We don't photograph, film or record athletes at seminars.

Live calls

If you join a live call with us (for example, the monthly founding-household call), Google Meet processes your name, email and what you say or show on the call. We don't record founding-household calls, and we never record a call that an athlete is on. If we ever plan to record another kind of call, we will tell everyone before it starts.

Family recording releases (rare, by invitation)

Now and then we invite a family to a recorded conversation about their experience. If a family agrees, we keep the signed release: the parent's name, email and phone, the athlete's first name, both typed signatures, and the choices made on the form. We also keep the recording. We never film an athlete. The athlete is recorded by voice only, and quoted in writing only as the family allows. A parent may choose to be on video. We use all of this only as the signed release allows, and the athlete and parent can each withdraw at any time.

Safety concerns

If someone raises a concern about a child's safety, we write down what was said, by whom, when, and what we did. These records may include an athlete's name and other details. Only Mitch sees them, plus the authorities if we make a report. They are never entered into an AI tool. Our Safeguarding Policy explains how we handle concerns.

Contact form

Our website contact form collects your name, email address and message. We use it to answer you. To block spam, the form uses Google reCAPTCHA, which checks that a person is submitting it. Google's privacy policy and terms apply to that check.

Emails you send us

When you write to mitch@toughleadersacademy.com or reply to one of our emails, we keep your email address, your message and anything you attach. An AI assistant may help sort your email and draft our reply (see section 5). Please don't send us your athlete's name or details. We don't need them.

Email engagement data

Kit records how people interact with our emails: whether an email was delivered and opened, which links were clicked, and the approximate location, device and email app, based on your IP address. We use this to see which emails are useful, to fix delivery problems, to remove addresses that bounce, and to stop emailing people who no longer read them.

Website visits, analytics and cookies

Squarespace hosts our website. When you visit, Squarespace automatically collects technical information such as your IP address, browser and device type, the pages you view, and the site that sent you. Squarespace uses cookies and similar technology to run the site (for example, to remember your cookie choice) and to give us visitor statistics. Our cookie banner lets you decline non-essential cookies, including analytics cookies.

Kit pages and forms embedded on our site may also set cookies so the form works.

We don't use advertising pixels or ad networks on our site, and we don't let third parties track you across other websites for advertising. Our site has no Meta Pixel, Google Analytics, Google Ads or other ad tags.

3. How we use information

We use information to:

deliver what you signed up for or bought
send emails you asked for, including product updates and offers from TLA (you can unsubscribe at any time)
answer your messages
process payments, refunds and cancellations
keep our records, pay taxes and meet legal duties
keep our services secure and prevent fraud
understand, in general terms, what is useful so we can improve it

We never use AI to make decisions about an athlete. We don't use information to make automated decisions that have legal or similarly significant effects on anyone.

4. Ride Home answers: how we treat them

The Ride Home choices describe a parent's athlete, who is a minor. They don't identify the athlete by name. Even so, we treat them carefully, as information about a minor:

One use only. We use them to choose which report email and which two follow-ups to send the parent. We may also count them in total, without names or email addresses (for example, "40 parents picked 'quiet'"), to decide what to write next.
Never sold. Not to anyone, for any price.
Never used for ads. Not for targeted advertising, and not shared with anyone for advertising.
Never entered into an AI tool. We don't enter them into AI tools, and we don't use AI to make decisions about an athlete.
Never shared except with Kit, which stores them for us to send the emails.
Deleted on request. Write mitch@toughleadersacademy.com and we will delete them, with or without the rest of your record. They are also deleted on the schedule in section 8.

The choices are about where an athlete is in their sport and how car rides go. They are not health information, and the form doesn't ask about health, injuries, diagnoses or treatment.

5. Who we share information with

We share information only with service providers that help us run TLA. They may use it only to provide their service to us.

Provider	What they do for us
Squarespace	website hosting, contact form, cookie banner, site analytics
Kit (ConvertKit)	our email list, landing pages and forms, and every email we send
Stripe	Forge payments and refunds, and card payments on seminar invoices
Google (Google Workspace, Gmail, Google Meet, reCAPTCHA)	our email inbox, files, video calls, and spam checks on the contact form
Anthropic (Claude)	an AI assistant that helps us sort incoming email, draft replies and draft content
Muse	an AI assistant that helps us keep our inbox organized and draft emails and social posts
xAI (Grok)	an AI assistant that posts our approved posts to X and flags public comments and mentions for Mitch

About the AI assistant. Emails sent to TLA may be sorted, and replies drafted, with help from an AI assistant. Mitch reads every reply before it goes out. That means the assistant may read what you write to us, so please leave your athlete's name and details out of your emails. We never enter athletes' names or details into AI tools ourselves, and we never use AI to make decisions about an athlete. Emails about a safeguarding concern are kept out of the AI assistant: put "Safeguarding" in the subject line and Mitch reads it himself. We use AI providers under terms that don't allow them to train their models on our data.

Stripe also uses some payment information for its own purposes, such as preventing fraud and meeting financial laws, under its own privacy policy.

We may also share information:

with our bank, to process check and bank transfer payments
with our lawyer, accountant or insurer, when they need it to advise or protect us
when the law requires it, such as a valid subpoena or court order
to report a concern about a child's safety to the proper authorities, as our Safeguarding Policy and the law require
to protect someone's safety, or to protect TLA against fraud or legal claims
if TLA is merged, sold or reorganized. Your information would stay covered by the promises in this policy.

6. We don't sell or share for advertising

We do not sell personal information. We do not share personal information for cross-context behavioral advertising (ads based on what you do across different websites and apps). We do not use personal information for targeted advertising. We have not done any of these things in the past 12 months.

7. Your choices and rights

These apply to everyone, whatever state or country you live in.

Unsubscribe. Every marketing email has an unsubscribe link. We stop within 10 business days, and usually right away.
See what we have. Ask for a copy of the personal information we hold about you.
Fix it. Ask us to correct anything that's wrong.
Delete it. Ask us to delete your information. We will delete it, and tell our providers to delete it, except:
- what we must keep by law, such as payment and tax records;
- the minimum needed to keep you off our list after you unsubscribe; and
- records we must keep for safety or legal reasons: records of a safeguarding concern, and signed releases and consents (with any withdrawal), kept for the periods in section 8. If you withdraw a recording release, we still delete the recordings as the release promises.
Forge refunds. Forge is a one-time purchase that does not renew, so there is nothing to cancel. To ask for a refund, email mitch@toughleadersacademy.com. Refunds are covered in section 9 of our Terms of Use.
Cookies. Use our cookie banner, or your browser settings, to decline non-essential cookies.

To make a request, write mitch@toughleadersacademy.com from the email address you used with us. If you write from a different address, we may ask a simple question to confirm it's you. We answer within 45 days, and usually much sooner. We don't charge for requests, and we won't treat you differently for making one.

If we turn down a request, we'll tell you why. You can ask Mitch to look at it again by replying to that email. If you still disagree, you can contact your state attorney general.

A parent or guardian can make these requests on behalf of their child.

Global Privacy Control and Do Not Track. If your browser sends a Global Privacy Control signal, we treat it as a valid request to opt out of the sale or sharing of your personal information and of targeted advertising. We don't do any of those things anyway. Because we don't track visitors across other websites, our site does not respond differently to "Do Not Track" browser signals.

8. How long we keep information

We keep information only as long as we need it for the reason we collected it.

Information	How long we keep it
Ride Home answers (tags)	Until the parent unsubscribes or asks us to delete them, and never more than 18 months after they were given. Deleted within 30 days of either.
Coach and parent email list records (name, email, sport, roster size)	While you're subscribed. Deleted within 90 days after you unsubscribe or ask. We also remove people who haven't opened an email in 12 months, after one email asking if they want to stay.
Email engagement data	Same as the email record it belongs to.
Unsubscribe list	Your email address only, kept so we never email you again.
Forge purchase records, and seminar agreements, invoices and payment records	7 years after the purchase or seminar, for tax and accounting.
Forge member details beyond payment records	Through the end of your Forge season, then 12 months.
Emails and contact-form messages	3 years, unless they're part of a purchase, a legal matter or a safety concern.
Raw recordings from a family recording release	Deleted within 2 years of the recording date, or within 30 days of a withdrawal, whichever comes first.
Signed releases and consents, and any withdrawal	As long as anything from the recording is in use, plus 3 years, so we can show we had permission and honored any withdrawal.
Records of a safeguarding concern	At least 7 years after the concern is closed, and longer if the law or a legal matter requires.
Website statistics	Kept by Squarespace in its analytics tools, under its own retention settings.

Deleted information may remain in our providers' backups for a short time until those backups are overwritten.

9. How we protect information

Only Mitch Allen, and anyone working for TLA under a duty of confidentiality, can access personal information, and only when they need it.
Every account that holds personal information uses a strong password and two-step sign-in.
We use established providers that protect data in transit and at rest.
We never store full card numbers. Stripe handles them.
We collect as little as we can. That's why the Ride Home form has no athlete name, school or free-text box.

No system is perfectly secure. If a breach affects your personal information, we will notify you as the law requires.

10. Children and teens

Our services are not directed to children under 13. We do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone under 13. Our website, emails and products are written for adult coaches and parents.

Teens 13 to 17 are not account holders. We don't sell to, market to or open accounts for anyone under 18, and we don't collect personal information from them. The one exception is a family recording release: an athlete 13 to 17 signs their own consent next to their parent's, and their voice is recorded with both signatures. Otherwise teens take part only through an adult: a coach running a session under their school's or club's policies, or a parent using Forge or The Ride Home. No AI tool or chatbot from TLA talks to an athlete.

Parent tools are for parents of athletes 13 and older. The Ride Home form asks the parent to confirm their athlete is 13 or older, and won't submit without it.

If we learn we collected information from someone under 13, or from any minor directly outside a signed family release, we will delete it promptly, stop emailing that address, and won't use the information for anything. The only exception is a record we must keep to protect a child's safety under our Safeguarding Policy. If you think this has happened, write mitch@toughleadersacademy.com.

11. Users outside the United States

TLA is based in Ohio and serves people in the United States. Our providers store information in the United States and may process it elsewhere. If you use our services from outside the United States, your information will be transferred to and handled in the United States under this policy.

12. Changes to this policy

When we change this policy, we'll post the new version here and update the effective date at the top. If a change is significant, we'll also email our lists before it takes effect. If a change would let us use information we already have in a materially different way, we'll ask for your permission first.

13. Contact

Questions, requests or concerns:

Tough Leaders Academy LLC, 9891 Montgomery Road, PMB 181, Cincinnati, OH 45242

Email: mitch@toughleadersacademy.com

Website: https://www.toughleadersacademy.com