How SoccerChoice works

A short, honest account of what happens to your enquiry — including what happens when we cannot help.

How it works

Step 1: Tell us what your child needs
Five short questions: your postcode, their age range, their current level and the kind of training you are after.
Step 2: We check suitable local options
We compare your answers against the training providers we hold information for in your area.
Step 3: A participating provider may contact you
If there is a suitable participating provider, we pass your enquiry to them so they can get in touch. If there is not, we will tell you.

What we ask you for

Five things, and nothing else:

Your postcode
Your child’s age range — a band such as 9–11, not a date of birth
Their current playing level
The kind of training you are looking for
Your first name, and a phone number or email address

What we deliberately do not ask for

We do not ask for your child’s full name, surname, date of birth, school, photograph, medical or disability information, or your home address. We do not want that information and we have not built anywhere to put it.

This is not a courtesy. The less we hold about a child, the less there is to lose, and a matching service simply does not need any of it to do its job.

What we do with it

Your postcode is turned into an approximate location so we can work out which providers are plausibly near you. We compare your answers against the training providers we hold information for, and rank the ones that fit.

If a suitable participating provider is found, we pass your enquiry to them — your first name, your contact details, your postcode, your child’s age range and what you are looking for — so they can contact you. That is the whole point of the service, and it is what you consent to when you submit the form.

We do not sell your details, we do not pass them to anyone other than a matched provider, and we do not send your child’s age or your postcode to analytics services.

When we cannot find a match

Three things can happen, and we will tell you which one it is.

No suitable provider. We hold information for providers near you, but none of them confirms they offer what you asked for. We say so rather than sending you the nearest thing.
Outside the area we cover. We currently cover Sydney and Adelaide. If you are elsewhere we will keep your enquiry — it tells us where to look for providers next — but we will not pretend we have an option for you.
We could not place your postcode. Occasionally a valid postcode is missing from our location data. When that happens a person reviews the enquiry by hand rather than a computer guessing.

Why we sometimes say “we don’t know”

Our information about providers is incomplete. For a lot of them we know they run training but have not confirmed, for example, whether they offer goalkeeper coaching or take beginners.

When we have not confirmed something, we treat it as unknown — not as a yes. It means we sometimes tell you we have no confirmed match when a provider down the road might in fact be perfect. We think that is the right way round: being sent to a provider who cannot help you wastes your Saturday and your goodwill.

If you asked for something specific

Goalkeeper training, 1-to-1 coaching, advanced-level work and holiday programs are treated as specific requests. If we cannot confirm a local provider offers the one you asked for, we will tell you — we will not substitute a general program and leave you to discover the difference at the first session.

Costs

SoccerChoice is free for parents. Participating providers pay us to receive enquiries. What the training itself costs is between you and the provider — see what training costs.

Your data afterwards

You can ask us what we hold about you and ask us to delete it. The privacy policy sets out how, along with how long we keep enquiries and who can see them.