Terms of Use
Effective 4 September 2026
These are the terms for coursechalk.com and the CourseChalk app. They are written to be read. If something here is unclear, email me and I will tell you what it means.
Who you are dealing with
CourseChalk is a service of ChalkBox. ChalkBox is the trading name of Ethan Bores, a sole proprietor in Norwalk, Ohio. In these terms, "I" and "me" mean him, and "you" means you.
You will see both names, so it is worth saying which is which. CourseChalk is the product. ChalkBox is the business behind it, and that is the name on your receipt and invoice. Your card statement will read COURSECHALK.
There is no support desk and no phone number. There is one person who answers email at ethanbores@gmail.com, usually the same day.
Who you are buying from
The license is mine to grant. The sale itself is handled by Stripe as merchant of record.
In practice that means Stripe is the seller on the transaction: Stripe takes the payment, issues the receipt and invoice, charges and remits any sales tax that is due, and handles disputes and billing questions. Your receipt will say the purchase was sold through Stripe, and the invoice will be headed ChalkBox. Everything about the software — what it does, whether it works, and support for it — is mine.
It is worth knowing which one to contact. A question about the charge — a receipt, a duplicate, a card problem — can go to either of us. A question about the app should come to me.
What CourseChalk is
A tool that runs in your web browser. You trace a cross country course on aerial imagery, it measures the line you drew, and it prints a meet flyer and packets with your course maps in them.
Your meet plan is a file on your own machine. There is no account, nothing to cancel, and no copy of your work on my side.
The free version and the season pass
The free version is the whole app. Nothing is locked, disabled or watermarked out of usefulness. Sheets printed without a license carry one line at the bottom naming me and my email address.
A season pass costs $49 and removes that line. It is for one person, and it runs until 31 July following the date you bought it — so a pass bought in September covers that entire cross country season, and a pass bought in June covers the season that follows.
A season pass is $49 plus any sales tax that applies where you are. Stripe works out whether tax is due and shows it before you pay; if you are buying for a school district or another tax-exempt body, there is a place at checkout to enter your exemption details.
What you are buying is permission to use the software, not the software itself. I keep ownership of CourseChalk; you get a personal, non-exclusive license for the season you paid for.
About your key
Your license key is yours. Handing it to a colleague at another school is not something I will send a lawyer about, but a key that turns up on dozens of separate installations is a key I may switch off. If yours ever stops working and it should not have, email me — I will fix it the same day, and I will not make you prove anything.
When a season pass runs out, nothing breaks. The app keeps working, your files keep opening, and the contact line comes back on new printouts.
Measurement — please read this one
CourseChalk is not a certified course measurement. It calculates distance across the WGS84 ellipsoid from the points you place on the map. That is accurate arithmetic on the line you drew. It is not a survey, not a calibrated-bicycle measurement, and not a USATF or World Athletics certification.
If a course has to be officially certified, or a time run on it has to be record-eligible, you need a certified measurer. CourseChalk will get you close and it will get you honest — it will not get you certified.
The line the app measures is where you clicked, not where runners actually run. Tangents, the width of a mown lane, and where the field chooses to cut a corner are all real distance and none of them are in the drawing.
Course safety is yours
Where a course goes, whether it is safe to run, whether it crosses a road or a parking lot, how it is marshaled, and what the medical plan is — those are decisions for you and your school. A drawing tool has no opinion about a blind corner or a drainage ditch. Nothing CourseChalk prints is a safety review, and nothing in it replaces walking the course.
Your files are yours
Your meet plans, course drawings, school logos, sponsor artwork, athlete names and every word you type belong to you. I do not receive them, cannot see them, and claim no rights in them.
The other side of that: uploading a logo or a photograph you do not have permission to use is your responsibility, not mine.
What you may not do
- Resell, sublicense, rent or redistribute CourseChalk itself. Selling the packets you make with it is exactly what it is for — selling the tool is not.
- Remove the contact line from printed sheets without a valid license.
- Use the site or the app to break the law, or to store anything you have no right to.
- Attack the site, overload it, or try to get at other people's data — of which there is very little, but the rule stands.
Maps and data that are not mine
CourseChalk draws on services run by other people:
| What | Whose |
|---|---|
| Aerial and topographic imagery | USGS The National Map and USDA NAIP — public domain |
| Address search | US Census Bureau geocoder. This product uses the Census Bureau Data API but is not endorsed or certified by the Census Bureau. |
| Map rendering | MapLibre GL JS |
| Distance calculation | GeographicLib |
| Optional worldwide maps and place search | MapTiler, when enabled |
Their terms govern their data, and their uptime is not mine to promise. If one of them goes down or changes what it offers, CourseChalk loses that feature and I will say so on the site.
No warranty
CourseChalk is provided as is and as available, without warranty of any kind, express or implied, including any implied warranty of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, title or non-infringement. I do not warrant that it will be uninterrupted, error-free, or that any measurement, map or printed document it produces is fit for any particular purpose of yours.
Some states do not allow the exclusion of implied warranties, so parts of this may not apply to you.
What I am on the hook for
To the fullest extent the law allows, I am not liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential or punitive damages, or for lost profits, lost data, or a meet that went badly.
My total liability to you for any claim is limited to what you actually paid me in the twelve months before the claim — which, for a free user, is zero, and for a season pass holder is $49.
That is not me being clever. It is the honest scale of a $49 tool made by one person, and you should weigh it before you rely on this for something that matters. Some states do not allow these limits, so parts of this may not apply to you.
If something goes wrong between us
Email me first. Nearly everything is a misunderstanding that one message fixes, and I would rather refund you than argue with you.
If that fails, these terms are governed by the law of the State of Ohio, without regard to its conflict-of-laws rules, and any dispute belongs in the state or federal courts sitting in Huron County, Ohio. There is no arbitration clause and no class-action waiver here — you keep every right you would otherwise have.
Changes to these terms
I may change these terms. If a change matters, I will date it here and say so on the site. A season pass you have already bought keeps the terms it was bought under until it expires.
Ending it
You can stop using CourseChalk whenever you like — there is nothing to cancel. I can end a license for a serious or repeated breach of these terms, and if I do that to a paying customer I will refund the unused part of the season.
Contact
ChalkBox — Ethan Bores
Norwalk, Ohio, United States
ethanbores@gmail.com