Glossary

Participant — a boy in the program

A boy enrolled in a Let Me Run season. We identify a boy by his name + date of birth, not his registration number — because a boy gets a brand-new registration ID every time he signs up, but he's still the same kid.

Example: Marcus Lee, DOB 3/14/2015, runs at Oakdale Elementary in Spring 2026 and again in Fall 2026. Two registrations, one participant.

Guardian

The parent or guardian listed on a boy's registration. All family contact — emails and phone numbers — lives on the guardian. Boys themselves never have contact fields in our system.

Example: On Marcus's profile you'll see his guardian's email; that's who an RD or coach would reach out to, never the boy.

Coach

A volunteer who leads a team through the season. Coaches sign up in Pinwheel and use the Coach Hub for their rosters and resources.

Example: A team needs at least one coach to run; "Coaches Needed" on the public Teams list means a site has no coach yet.

Parent-Coach

A coach who is also the parent/guardian of a boy on the same site. We spot this when a coach's email matches a guardian's email at that site. It matters for recruiting — parent-coaches often leave when their own son ages out.

Example: If a parent-coach's son graduates next year and no other coach is lined up, that site is flagged "at-risk" for the RD to act on.

Alumni

A former participant — a boy who ran in past seasons but is now aged out or no longer enrolled. We match alumni across seasons so a boy's full history stays connected.

Example: A 2019 runner who's now in high school shows up under Alumni, with his old teams still linked to his story.

Person — the whole human

The single, canonical record for one human being — who may hold several roles at once. Instead of hopping between a coach page and a donor page for the same individual, the People profile folds every role into one page.

Example: Chris is a coach, a guardian of two runners, and a donor. That's one Person with three roles — not three separate records.

RD — Regional Director

The staff member who runs a region: recruiting and supporting coaches, opening and keeping sites alive, and hitting enrollment goals. Much of the OS is built to make the RD's job easier.

Example: The coach-recruitment board and the at-risk-sites worklist are both RD tools.

Donor

Someone who gives money to Let Me Run. Donor is one of the roles a Person can hold, and it sits on the same profile as their other roles — so a coach who also gives shows both. Giving history comes in from our fundraising records.

Example: Chris coaches a team and also donates twice a year; his profile shows both the Coach and Donor roles.

Household

A family grouped into one unit in the OS, tied together by a shared guardian email. It's how brothers and their parents connect, instead of floating as separate, unrelated records.

Example: Two boys who register under the same parent email roll up into one household.

ED — Executive Director

The head of Let Me Run. Where an RD runs a single region, the ED leads the whole organization — strategy, budget, and national direction.

Example: Org-wide calls that cross every region sit with the ED.

Site

The physical location where a program runs — usually a school. A site is the "address parent": it has one location and can host several teams over time.

Example: "Oakdale Elementary" is a site. It's the same site whether it's running one team or three.

Site Creation “Site Created” on Team Setup

Creating the site record in the dashboard — entering the school/location into the OS so a team can be set up against it. On the Team Setup board this is the Site Created gate.

Example: Before a new Fall team can be set up, its site has to exist in the dashboard; "Site Created" is marked once that record is in.

Not the old Site Application. "Site Created" refers only to creating the site in the dashboard. It is not the former Site Application process, which no longer applies.

Team

A site + a grade band, in a specific season. One site can have multiple teams (e.g. split by grade), and a fresh set of teams is created each season.

Example: "Oakdale Elementary 3rd–5th, Fall 2026" is a team. Same site, a different grade band or a different season = a different team.

Site vs Team, in one line: the site is where (the school); the team is who's running there this season (a grade band in a given season). One site → many teams.

Region

One of five buckets we organize the whole country into: Charlotte (includes NC Charlotte, NC Gaston, and SC Upper Palmetto), Columbus, Seattle, St. Louis, and Expansion.

Example: Every site rolls up to exactly one region, which is how RDs see just their own turf.

Expansion

Not a place — it's the catch-all region for every LMR market outside the four operational focus regions. Historically 40+ states have rolled up here; smaller markets live under Expansion rather than getting their own region.

Example: A single team running in a state with no dedicated RD is counted under Expansion.

Focus region

One of the four regions Let Me Run staffs and prioritizes: Charlotte, Columbus, Seattle, and St. Louis. Everything outside them rolls up under Expansion.

Example: Some features — like the Early Bird pill — apply only in the focus regions.

Season codes — S26, F26…

Shorthand for a season: the first letter is the term (S = Spring, F = Fall), the number is the year.

Example: S26 = Spring 2026, F26 = Fall 2026, Su24 = Summer 2024.

Early Bird

A boy in a focus region (Charlotte, Columbus, Seattle, St. Louis) who registers early — before the season's Early Bird cutoff (Aug 15 for Fall 2026) — and picks a Preferred Site on his registration. As a thank-you he's mailed a carabiner & charm, and an ⭐ Early Bird pill stays with him all season, on the Dashboard and in the Coach Hub. For RDs, his Preferred Site is the clearest signal of where a family wants a team — so it points to where to aim coach recruitment.

Example: RDs see how many Early Bird sign-ups a region has and where; coaches see which boys on their roster get the charm.

Focus regions only. Boys in Expansion never qualify — the Preferred Site question isn't even asked during their registration, so there's no Preferred Site on file for them.

One name only: this program used to be called "Early Access." It's now Early Bird everywhere — the old name is retired.

Aging Out

A participant whose eligibility ends after the coming school year — he's about to graduate past the grade a site serves. Worth flagging so we can plan for retention and coach succession.

Example: A 5th grader at a site that tops out at 5th grade gets an "Aging Out" badge on his profile.

Graduated

A participant who has moved past the top grade his site serves and is no longer grade-eligible to run there — the completed state of Aging Out. He's done running not because he chose to stop, but because he outgrew the program.

Example: A boy who ran as a 5th grader at a K–5 site and is now in middle school has graduated; he shows up under Alumni, and his absence never counts against retention.

Graduated vs. Alumni: Alumni is any former participant, for any reason. Graduated is the specific case of a boy who aged out of the grades a site serves — so he had no opportunity to return (see Opportunity-Adjusted).

Retention

Whether a boy comes back. A boy is "retained" if he enrolls in any later season while he's still grade-eligible — not only the very next season.

Example: A boy who runs in Spring, sits out Fall, then returns the next Spring still counts as retained.

Opportunity-Adjusted (OA)

A fairer way to measure retention: only count boys who actually had a team to return to. If a boy's site closed, we don't ding retention for his not coming back — he had no opportunity.

Example: Our headline OA retention is 54%, versus a raw 28.8% that unfairly counts boys with nowhere to return.

Word choice: we always say "Opportunity-Adjusted," never "True" retention.

Financial Assistance (FA)

Reduced or waived registration fees so cost isn't a barrier. FRL (Free/Reduced Lunch) is a common eligibility marker. We treat FA as an access-and-need issue, not a retention lever.

Example: A family qualifying under FRL might pay a reduced fee rather than the full registration price.

Preferred Site

A required question on Early Bird registration: the site a family most wants their boy to run at, chosen before teams are finalized. It's the field we key Early Bird off of, and it points RDs to where demand — and the need for a coach — is building. Only focus-region families are asked; Expansion registrations don't include it.

Example: A Preferred Site of "Oakdale Elementary" tells the RD a family there wants a team, even before one exists.

Succession Risk

A site is at succession risk when the coach keeping it alive is a parent-coach whose own son ages out next year and no other coach is lined up to take over. It's a heads-up to recruit a successor before the site goes dark.

Example: A one-coach site run by a dad whose 5th grader graduates in the spring gets a ⚠️ succession-risk flag for the RD.

PII — Personally Identifiable Information

Any information that identifies a real person — names, birth dates, emails, phone numbers, addresses. Because we serve minors, we handle their PII with the highest care: it's access-controlled, never published to a public page, and never baked into files we post online.

Example: A boy's name and DOB never appear in a public web address — participant pages use a scrambled ID so his identity can't be read off the link.

Golden rule: when in doubt about sharing anything with a real boy's details, slow down and ask. Minors' data is the highest-care work we do.

"Not on file"

What we show when a piece of information is genuinely empty. We never invent or fill in placeholder data — especially for real boys. An empty field says "Not on file," not a fake name or number.

Example: If a guardian phone was never provided, the profile reads "Not on file" — never a made-up (123) 456-7890.

Pinwheel

The youth-sports platform where families and coaches actually register (pinwheel.us). It's the source of the data exports our tools read. Today it's the system of record for sign-ups.

Example: The daily refresh starts with an Excel export from Pinwheel, which our scripts then process.

Heads-up: our platform is pinwheel.us — not getpinwheel.com, which is a different company.

The Dashboard

Our internal staff tool at dashboard.letmerun.org — the home of the LMR OS. Season stats, People, Coaches, Participants, Resources, and the workflows all live here. Staff sign in with an emailed 6-digit code.

Example: This glossary, the Resources tab, and the retention study are all pages on the Dashboard.

Coach Hub

A separate portal for coaches at coaches.letmerun.org. Each coach signs in and sees just their own team's roster, schedule, and resources — built to work outdoors, on a phone.

Example: A coach checks the Coach Hub on the sidelines to see who's on today's roster.

LMR OS

Our name for the whole connected system inside the Dashboard — one relationship graph of people, sites, teams, and history, with many views on top. Think of it as the operating system for running Let Me Run.

Example: The People, Coaches, and Participants pages are all different lenses onto the same OS data.

The plumbing — Supabase, Netlify, Resend

The three behind-the-scenes services that run our tools: Supabase is the secure database (where the data lives), Netlify hosts the web pages, and Resend sends the login-code emails. You rarely need to think about these — they're the pipes, not the faucet.

Example: When you get a 6-digit sign-in code by email, that's Resend delivering it and Supabase checking it.

Green data — “Pinwheel has: …”

When staff correct a name, email, or phone in the OS, the fix shows in green with a small “Pinwheel has: …” note beneath it. Green means we own that value — a staff correction — while un-highlighted values came straight from Pinwheel. Our corrections never overwrite Pinwheel; they sit on top and survive every rebuild.

Example: A coach's email was mistyped in Pinwheel; an RD fixes it, and the profile shows the correct one in green, with "Pinwheel has:" the old one underneath.

Daily refresh

The routine that pulls the latest Pinwheel export and pushes fresh registration and roster data into the OS, so the Dashboard and Coach Hub show current numbers. It moves data only — it doesn't change the pages themselves.

Example: After the morning refresh, a boy who registered yesterday shows up on his team's roster.

Workflows

The part of the OS that holds the action tools — where staff do work rather than just look things up: Start a Team, Website Info, Coach Applications, the Coach Recruitment board, and F26 Teams. If a task has a queue or a form behind it, it lives under Workflows.

Example: A new team request comes in through Start a Team and waits in the Workflows queue for an RD to review.