Why it matters
The plan has to exist before the emergency
Sudden cardiac arrest. Exertional heat stroke. Catastrophic head and neck injury. Severe bleeding. Life-threatening emergencies can be survivable, and survival is decided in the first few minutes, at the venue. Not at the hospital. At the field.
This is true of a high school stadium, a youth league diamond, a club volleyball tournament and a parks department soccer complex alike. If athletes gather there, the venue needs its own plan.
Respara joins response and preparation into one name, because a response is only as good as the preparation that happened before it was needed. A plan built during the emergency itself is not preparation, it is improvisation. Everything below is about finishing that preparation weeks in advance, so the response is already decided by the time anyone needs it.
In cardiac arrest, the odds of survival fall with every minute before compressions and defibrillation. And minutes are exactly what disappears when nobody is certain who calls 911, when the AED is locked in an office three buildings away, or when the ambulance pulls up to a gate that only opens from the inside. None of those are medical problems. They are planning problems, solved in advance or not at all.
That is why the National Athletic Trainers' Association calls for a written, venue-specific Emergency Action Plan, developed with local EMS, rehearsed at least annually, and posted where it will actually be used. And it is why a growing number of states now require one of school athletics programs, with state high school associations writing the same expectation into their handbooks. But the mandate isn't the point. The plan is the difference between a coordinated response and five people all reaching for a phone.
Here is the version most programs are living with: one document, written years ago, generic across every site, sitting on a single laptop, never rehearsed. A plan for “the program” is not a plan for the softball field a quarter mile down the road, with a different address, a different gate, a different nearest AED. This platform exists to make the current, venue-specific, posted version of that plan the easy one to have.
What you actually build
Each field, court, gym, and pool gets its own plan: address, GPS coordinates, what3words, and the details an ambulance crew actually needs. Which gate, which access road, where the lockbox is.
Name who calls 911, who retrieves the AED, who meets EMS, who controls the scene, who documents it. Roles, not job titles, so the plan still works when the head athletic trainer is at an away game.
Drop AEDs, first aid kits, cold-water immersion tubs, bleeding-control kits, and EMS entrances onto a real image of your venue. Colors follow NATA convention, not your own brand palette, so a marker means the same thing at every site.
List the receiving hospitals with travel times and designate a primary. The plan says where the athlete is going before anyone has to decide it under pressure.
The eight standard emergency conditions arrive already written from NATA guidance: cardiac arrest, heat illness, head and spine injury, and the rest. Every one of them is editable to match your own medical direction. Turn on the WBGT heat policy and your region's activity levels print alongside them in every outdoor plan.
A venue plan, a wall sign, a bag tag, the full binder. Documents, not screens, ready to hang in a dugout or hand to a coach. Share links let officials and visiting teams read a plan without an account, and can be revoked.
Rehearsal Mode picks a venue and a sport and walks three scenarios built from that venue's own details — the gate EMS uses, where the AED actually is, which hospital and how far. A practice setting and a game setting, because the Tuesday practice is where most of it happens. A scenario that doesn't fit your venue, say cold weather in Phoenix, is swapped for another with Does not apply, and Roles & assignments opens over the walkthrough to show who holds each role, with any unfilled role flagged. Check off who was in the room and every attendee's record is dated for you.
Dated approvals, a coach roster with each coach's sports, last rehearsal and CPR expiration (import the list once, update a whole class's CPR dates at once), and every AED checked with pad and battery expiry reminders. Each record filters down to what needs attention. A plan pointing at a dead AED is worse than no plan at all.
Required in many places, asked for in all of them
A growing number of states require school athletics programs to keep a written emergency action plan for each venue, reviewed annually and rehearsed with the staff who would run it. The specifics vary by state and by association, so check your own, and check what your league or insurer expects of you. Youth sports organizations, clubs and parks departments are often outside the statute and squarely inside the same expectation: nobody is held to a lower standard of care because the field is theirs rather than a district's.
Which is where most programs are exposed. Having a plan and being able to show you had one are different things, and the second is what gets asked for: by an athletic director, a district office, an insurer, a state association, or a family afterwards. This platform keeps the record as you go. Every venue plan carries its address, its access notes and its review date. Approvals are dated and named. Rehearsals are logged per coach, so you can say who had walked the plan and when — and because the usual reason there is no record is that the rehearsal never happened, the platform will run one with you and log it at the end. AED checks carry initials and dates. All of it exports as a document you can hand over.
To be plain about the limits: documentation is not immunity, and nothing here is legal advice. What it gives you is a current plan, posted where it will be used, and a dated record that it was reviewed, approved and rehearsed. That is the part programs most often cannot produce.
You don't have to start from a blank page
Most programs already have something: a plan written years ago, a Word document, a scanned binder page. It is usually one generic document for every site, out of date, and on one person's laptop. Retyping it is the reason a new plan never gets finished, so you don't have to. Upload the plan you have and it is read into a draft: venues, personnel and their roles, hospitals and travel times, AED and equipment locations, emergency numbers, and the people who signed it.
Then you review it before any of it is kept. Each venue is shown field by field, next to the sentence in your document it came from, and you accept venues one at a time. It is a draft you check, not a plan that appears.
- It does not guess. If your document has no GPS coordinates, the draft has none either. A blank field is the honest answer, and a made-up gate or phone number in an emergency plan is worse than an empty one.
- It does not overwrite your work. Applying an import fills empty fields and adds new venues. Anything you have already typed stays exactly as you typed it, and the summary afterwards tells you where it left your version alone.
- It tells you what it could not use. Concussion return-to-play protocols, heat index charts, consent forms: the things this platform has nowhere to put are listed back to you, so you know what did not come across instead of assuming it all did.
- It flags what it struggled to read. A venue described in one vague sentence, or a bad scan, is marked as worth a closer look rather than presented with the same confidence as a clearly written page.
The point of an import is not to finish your plan. It is to get the typing out of the way so the part that needs your judgment, and your medical direction, is what you actually spend time on. What comes out is the plan you already had, with its gaps visible, in a format you can post at a venue and hand to an inspector.
Buying with confidence
You are being asked to put your program's emergency documents, and its money, into software from a small company. Being careful about that is the right instinct. So here, plainly, is what protects you.
The demo is a complete working workspace with sample data and no account required. Nothing you do in it touches a real database, and there is nothing to cancel afterward.
First year, setup fee, mid-year upgrade: every charge shows you the exact amount and waits for you to accept it. No silent charges, no default-on add-ons, no surprise line items.
Card entry happens inside Stripe's own payment form, embedded in our billing page. Your card number goes straight from your browser to Stripe. Our application never sees it, transmits it, or stores it. We keep the brand and last four digits, nothing else.
Request a purchase order invoice and nothing is charged until it is approved. We issue a net-30 invoice your business office or treasurer can process, and checks are recorded by hand when they arrive. If the purchase is turned down upstream, you were never billed.
Uploading your old plan fills empty fields and adds venues. It never overwrites a value you entered, and it says so afterwards where it left yours in place. Nothing is written until you have reviewed it field by field.
Every plan, sign, bag tag, and binder downloads whenever you want it, and export is never restricted by the state of your subscription. Nobody should find their Emergency Action Plan paywalled during an emergency.
Cancel from the billing page whenever you like. The renewal stops and you keep the year you already paid for. No cancellation fee, no phone call, no retention gauntlet.
Every workspace is a separate tenant. Each read and write is checked against your membership in that organization on the server; a workspace id handed over by a browser is never trusted on its own.
Owner, admin, editor, and view-only roles mean a coach can read the plan without rewriting it. Share links are individually revocable and can be set to expire.
What we don't claim
A safety product should be the last place you find marketing language, so plainly: this platform is a planning and documentation tool, not medical direction. It does not practice medicine, it does not supervise your events, and it cannot make a plan correct for your venues. The protocol text ships from published NATA guidance as a starting point. Every word of it, and every plan you build, must be reviewed and approved by your own qualified medical and administrative personnel before it goes into use.
We also make no formal compliance certifications: no SOC 2, HIPAA, or FERPA attestation, because we do not hold them. What we do instead is keep the amount of sensitive information here low by design: plans hold venue logistics and staff role assignments, not athlete medical records. Card handling is Stripe's, not ours. And because export is never restricted, you can always hold your own copy of everything you build here. That is the most durable protection there is against depending on any vendor, us included.
Start with the demo
Look at a finished plan before you decide anything. When you are ready, see the plans and pricing. And if you need a purchase order first, that path is built in.
Built and supported by Team21 Training & Recovery.