Every sales conversation Cracking Flags has, at some point, arrives at the same question. Why wouldn’t we just use the SMA tool? It’s free, it’s well-known, a growing number of Australian sporting bodies have already adopted it. It’s a fair question, and it deserves a serious answer rather than a defensive one.

So here’s the serious answer: you probably should be using the SMA tool. It’s a credible risk model and we have no interest in replacing it. The question isn’t whether you use it. The question is what happens after the tool returns a reading, and that’s the part that no calculator, free or paid, in Australian sport is currently built to handle.

What the SMA tool actually is

The Sports Medicine Australia Extreme Heat Policy tool is a free web calculator hosted at sma-heat-policy.sydney.edu.au. It was developed by the University of Sydney’s Heat and Health Research Centre and is endorsed and co-branded by Sports Medicine Australia. The current version, released in March 2025, is documented in a peer-reviewed paper in the Journal of Science and Medicine in Sport (Tartarini et al., 2025) and uses the ISO 7933:2023 Predicted Heat Strain model, calibrated across forty individually characterised sports.

A growing list of Australian sporting bodies have adopted the SMA framework as their stated heat policy: Football NSW, Hockey Australia, Little Athletics Australia, Netball Victoria, WA, and Queensland, Pickleball Australia, Volleyball Australia, AFL Wimmera Mallee, and (by delegation) School Sport Australia, among others. The tool has been re-hosted internationally by the WHO/WMO joint Global Heat Health Information Network. It is, fairly, the closest thing Australian sport has to a de facto risk-reading standard.

What it does well

The SMA tool produces a sport-specific risk classification — Low, Moderate, High, or Extreme — for any postcode in Australia, with a seven-day forecast and a tiered set of recommended risk-reduction actions. The underlying biophysical model accounts for sport-specific metabolic load, clothing, and activity duration. The institutional credibility behind it is real: it sits on a peer-reviewed foundation, behind a research centre with global standing on heat and health. If you need a defensible, sport-aware risk reading for healthy adults, the SMA tool is the right tool to use.

What it is scoped to

The interesting question is where the tool’s design boundaries sit. The SMA tool is scoped — by deliberate design — to four things it does not do, and was never built to do:

  1. Risk calculation, not policy enforcement. It returns a risk reading. It does not surface your organisation’s specific policy response in your organisation’s wording. The bridge between “the risk is High” and “your competition’s rules say to do this specific thing right now” is left to the user.
  2. Healthy adults aged 18 to 59. The validated model is bounded to that range. Junior competitions, school sport, and senior competitions need different policy responses, and the tool isn’t designed to apply them.
  3. No record of the check. There is no login, no timestamp, no audit trail. The tool deliberately returns a reading and stops there. It isn’t a compliance system and shouldn’t be asked to behave like one.
  4. One user at a time. No administrator view, no multi-site management, no shared deployment across the umpires in a competition, no historical query against past checks.

These are scope, not limitations. The tool does what it was built to do, very well.

The layer that’s missing

The structural point sits one level up. For any free or paid risk calculator in Australian sport today — the SMA tool, a Kestrel reading, a Bureau-of-Meteorology-plus-spreadsheet workflow — nothing closes the gap between the tool returned a risk reading and we have a permanent record showing what was checked, where, when, what our policy said to do, and what we did. A review of more than twenty Australian sporting bodies confirmed it: not a single one mandates that routine heat-stress checks be logged or retained. The compliance layer doesn’t exist anywhere in Australian sport. See the workflow argument in full: Why your heat policy probably can’t be followed →

What Cracking Flags is

Cracking Flags is the operational layer above whatever risk model your organisation has chosen.

The platform is algorithm-agnostic by design. It can run your organisation’s own thresholds, a third-party model where licensing is in place, or the Cracking Flags default. The risk reading is not where we add value: that question has already been answered well by people more credentialed than us. What Cracking Flags adds are the four things a risk calculator was never built to provide: your organisation’s specific policy response, surfaced in your wording at the point of decision; age-and-cohort-aware policy application across seniors, juniors, and any category you distinguish; a compliance log built automatically as a by-product of every check; and a multi-user, multi-site administrator view that makes the whole thing deployable across a competition. See how this looks in cricket →

The close

The SMA tool is the standard. It is the credible answer to what is the risk today. Cracking Flags is the answer to what does our policy say to do about it, can we prove anyone checked, and can we show that record three years from now when someone asks. Different questions. Different layers. Both worth getting right.

If you’ve adopted the SMA framework and you’re starting to feel the gap between the policy exists and the policy actually runs at the ground, that’s the conversation we have every week.