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Jimenez Julien
I am Jimenez Julien. I build and maintain VaultChalk, and I answer the email that arrives at the address on every page of this site. VaultChalk is published by MLJ, SASU, a small company I run, and it is the only product I work on for competitive gymnastics and cheer.
Why I built this for gyms
The first competitive gym I worked with kept its whole optional program in a three ring binder with a broken spine. The head coach could tell you, from memory, which of forty two athletes had a clean giant and which one still needed a spot. That knowledge was real and hard won, and it lived in exactly one place: her handwriting and her head. When she took a week off after shoulder surgery, the program did not stop, but it wobbled for seven days, and two athletes were entered at a level they were not ready for.
That is the problem I wanted to solve, and it is a narrow one. Not scheduling. Not payroll. Not a portal that tries to be everything a gym touches. Just this: the record of what each athlete can do, kept current by the people who actually watch her do it, connected to the two things that depend on it, meet entries and money.
I spent the better part of a year in gyms before I wrote the first production line of code. I sat through Saturday sessions in Ohio and Arizona. I watched a team director build an entry file at a kitchen table at ten at night with three browser tabs and a legal pad. I learned that the enemy of any tool in a gym is the moment a coach has to stop watching a skill to record it, and that any interface asking for more than two taps between rotations will quietly be abandoned by February.
What I learned about this trade
Gym owners are among the most operationally disciplined people I have worked with, and they are almost always under resourced on the office side. The same person signs the insurance renewal, hires the Level 3 coach, negotiates the meet host contract and sweeps the foam pit. When a vendor tells her a tool will save her time, she has heard it before, and she has the abandoned subscriptions to prove it.
So the standard I hold VaultChalk to is not features. It is whether the thing gets used in week six, when the novelty is gone and the season is heavy. That is why skill marking is two taps, why nothing requires a laptop, and why we do not send a weekly digest that nobody reads. It is also why I resist requests that would widen the product into class registration or point of sale. There are good tools for that already, and a product that tries to hold everything ends up holding nothing well.
The other thing I learned is that most disputes in a competitive program are information problems wearing an emotional coat. A parent who can see the two open skills, dated, marked by a named coach, rarely wants a meeting. That single screen has done more for the gyms on this platform than any report I have ever built.
Experience and expertise
- Fifteen years building operational software for small businesses that run on shift work and deadlines.
- Direct field research in competitive gyms across Ohio, Arizona, Massachusetts, Texas and Oregon, including full meet weekends as an observer.
- Working knowledge of compulsory and optional level structures, Xcel divisions and all star tumbling and stunt progressions, checked with active judges and coaches.
- Hands on responsibility for data protection practice at MLJ, SASU, including retention, access control and export.
- Founder and publication director of MLJ, SASU, registered in Paris, operating VaultChalk for United States customers.
How this product is built and maintained
VaultChalk ships small changes weekly rather than large releases twice a year. Every change that touches a skill chart, an entry file or a family balance is tested against real season data from consenting gyms before it goes out. I write the release notes myself, in plain language, and I name what broke when something breaks.
Editorially, every claim on this site is one I can support. The gym count, the entry volume and the collection figures come from our own production records for the trailing twelve months, and I update them when they move. Testimonials are published with the full name, role, business and city of the person who gave them, with their written permission. If a number here ever stops being true, the fix is to change the number, not to soften the sentence around it.
On the product side, support is not outsourced. When you write to the contact address you reach me or one of two colleagues who have both spent time on a gym floor. We answer inside one business day, and we tell you when we cannot do something rather than adding it to a roadmap that never arrives.
What I am accountable for
I am accountable for the accuracy of athlete records, for the safety of the documents you store with us, for the uptime of the service during entry weekends, and for the honesty of the words on this site. If VaultChalk is the wrong tool for your program, I would rather tell you on the first call than take three months of subscription from you.
Published articles
Everything I have written so far for Chalk Line, the VaultChalk magazine on running a competitive gymnastics or cheer program.
- How do I move a Level 3 gymnast to Level 4 without skipping the skills USAG actually requires?
- Should I run my cheer program under USASF rules or stay with a school league schedule?
- What do I get wrong when I collect competition fees from parents before meet entries close?
- What does SafeSport actually require of my gym, and who on my staff has to be trained?
- How did one gym rebuild its team levels after losing half a roster to a rival program?
- Is the shift toward Xcel and prep level cheer going to change how I staff my gym?
- What should be on my checklist the week before we travel to an out of state meet?
- How much does one competitive gymnast really cost my gym per season once I count everything?
- What does a judge see in the first ten seconds of a compulsory beam routine at a meet?
Contact the author
Email jimenezjulien42@gmail.com. Tell me your levels, your meet count and the part of the season that costs you the most rework. If you want to see the product first, the demo request form is on the home page, and the pricing section lists every plan.
Maintained by Jimenez Julien. Questions about this page go to jimenezjulien42@gmail.com.