Ranks & promotions
Your academy ranks its members through a rank system: an ordered ladder of levels, each with its own color and its own number of stripes. TrainOS gives every academy the BJJ Adult Belts ladder ready to use, and you can build ladders of your own for kids, for a second discipline, or for anything else you grade.
One rank per member
A level and a stripe count, on their profile, on the roster, and at the front-desk kiosk.
Assign a first rank
Rank a new member, or your whole existing roster in one pass.
Promote a member
Record the new level in seconds. It lands on their permanent timeline.
Instructors propose, admins approve
A coach puts someone forward, staff talk it over, an owner or admin decides.
How rank works
A member holds one rank at a time inside one rank system — a level from that system's ladder, plus a stripe count. It appears wherever staff and members look someone up: their profile, the roster, and the check-in kiosk, where the confirmation circle fills with their level's color.
BJJ Adult Belts is enabled for your academy from the start, so you can rank people straight away.
The built-in BJJ Adult Belts ladder. White through brown take up to four stripes each, black takes six, and coral and red take none.
A member joins as Unranked and stays there until a staff member gives them a rank. That is the normal starting point for everyone — TrainOS leaves the first call to you rather than assuming a belt. Assigning it takes a few seconds.
You can also run several ladders side by side and design your own. See Custom rank systems.
Assign a first rank
Assigning records where a member already stands: their rank system, their level, and their stripe count. It sets their rank and leaves their promotion history alone, because you're writing down a rank they already hold rather than awarding a new one.
Open their profile
Go to Members and click the member's name.
Click Assign rank
It sits on the Rank & Promotions card, next to Unranked.
Pick the system, level and stripes
Your default rank system comes pre-selected, with its lowest level ready to go. Change them to wherever this member actually is.
Save it
Click Assign rank. Their rank shows on the card and on the roster immediately.
Rank your whole roster at once
When you first adopt a rank system, the roster lets you rank the whole gym in one pass. Go to Members, tick the people you want, and a bar appears above the list with Assign rank system. Choose one system, level and stripe count, and everyone in the selection gets it.
Bulk assignment gives a first rank, so anyone in the selection who already has one keeps it — the dialog tells you how many were skipped. Moving a member who is already ranked to a different ladder is its own flow: Move a member between systems.
Find everyone still waiting for a rank
The unranked pill by the roster filters carries a live count. Click it to show exactly those members, tick them all, and assign in one go.
Promote a member
This is the everyday flow. Someone earns their next stripe or their next belt, and you record it.
Open their profile
Go to Members and click the member's name.
Click Promote
On the Rank & Promotions card.
Set the new rank
Pick the New level, then the stripe count if that level takes any. Add a note if there's something worth remembering — a competition result, time in grade, a standout performance.
Record it
Click Record promotion. Their rank changes on the spot, and the promotion joins their history.
A promotion stays inside the member's own rank system, which is why the dialog shows the system but asks only for the level.
Promotions are added, never overwritten, so the timeline stays a true record of what happened and when. If you record the wrong level, record another promotion with the right one — both stay on the timeline, in order, and the latest one is their rank. Every entry keeps its own snapshot of the level name, the date and the promoter, so it still reads correctly years later even if the ladder has changed since.
Members who haven't claimed their app account yet are promoted exactly the same way. When they claim their profile, the whole history is already there waiting for them. See Members & profiles.
Promotion proposals
Proposals are how the mat floor and the front desk agree on a promotion before it happens. Instructors, admins and owners can put a member forward; staff discuss it in the comments; an owner or admin approves or rejects it.
To start one, click Propose on the member's Rank & Promotions card, pick the level and stripe count, and write the Reason. That reason is what the person deciding reads.
An owner or admin can reject instead of approving — the proposal closes and the member's rank is unchanged.
Approving is the decision, not the promotion. Recording it stays a separate step, taken whenever you're ready, so a promotion can be agreed weeks ahead and still land as a surprise on the day.
A proposal stays among the staff who aren't its subject. A member never sees a proposal about themselves, even when that member is an instructor or an admin, and nobody proposes their own promotion.
Everything about a proposal lives on the member's profile rather than in an inbox, so that card is the one place to look. When something is waiting on a decision, the Rank & Promotions heading carries a count badge.
Custom rank systems
Kids grade differently from adults, and judo grades differently from BJJ. A rank system is yours to design: your level names, your colors, how many sub-degrees each level holds, and what you call them.
Open Settings in the dashboard sidebar, then Manage rank systems. On mobile it's Academy Settings → Rank Systems. Owners and admins manage this catalog.
Click Create rank system
Name it — Kids Belts, Judo Kyu Grades, whatever your members call it — and set the Discipline it belongs to.
Say what this system calls sub-degrees
Stripes is the default. Type degrees, grades, or your own word, and every screen picks it up — "Blue · 2 degrees".
Lay out the levels
Lowest rank first. Each level takes a name, a color, and how many sub-degrees it can hold. Drag them, or use the arrows, to reorder.
Create it
The system is enabled for your academy the moment it's created, ready for the assign dialog.
Starting from something that already works is often quicker: pick Duplicate to customize on a built-in system and you get a copy your academy owns and can edit freely, with the original untouched.
Your academy can run as many systems at once as it needs — Kids Belts alongside BJJ Adult Belts alongside a striking ladder — and each member sits in exactly one of them. Mark the one you use most as the default, and it comes pre-selected every time you assign a rank.
Move a member between systems
When a child graduates into the adult belts, open their profile and click Change rank system. It asks what kind of move this is, because the two are recorded differently:
Either way, the promotions they already earned stay on their timeline, labelled with the system they were earned in.
Managing the systems your academy usesAdd, duplicate, set a default, or take one out of circulation.
What members see
A member opens the Profile tab in the app to find their current rank and their full promotion history — every level in order, with the date and who awarded it, and Show earlier promotions to open the rest once there are more than three.
Show 2 earlier promotions
Members see each other's current rank — on a teammate's profile in the community, on the roster, on the kiosk screen at check-in. Promotion history is the part that stays between the member and your staff.
The announcement stays yours to make
A promotion doesn't post itself to the community feed or fire off a push notification. Members hear it from you, on the mats, and find the record waiting in their app afterwards. See Community feed for how posts and comments work.
Who does what
| Feature | Owner | Admin | Instructor | Student |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Assign a member's first rank | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | — |
| Promote a member | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | — |
| Propose a promotion | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | — |
| Comment on a proposal | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | — |
| Approve or reject a proposal | ✓ | ✓ | — | — |
| Create or edit a rank system | ✓ | ✓ | — | — |
| View someone else's promotion history | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | — |
| View their own promotion history | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
Instructors work from the mobile app
The web dashboard is for owners and admins. Instructors do all of this — assigning, promoting, proposing and commenting — from their phone, and their promotions land on the same timeline as yours.
Rank and staff role are separate things
An instructor can promote an admin, or the owner. Who runs the front desk and who runs the mats are two different questions, so the head instructor stays in charge of everyone's rank.
See Roles & permissions for the full permission reference across every feature.
See also
- Members & profiles — the rest of the profile, claim codes, and unclaimed members
- Roles & permissions — what owners, admins, instructors and students can each do
- Attendance & check-ins — the kiosk screen that shows a member's rank color
- Academy settings — where rank systems sit among your other settings