California AB 310 Compliance Guide: What Youth Sports Programs Must Do Before January 1, 2027
January 1, 2027 is a coach certification deadline, not an equipment deadline. That distinction is where most California youth sports programs are going to get caught, and the gap between the two dates is exactly why this needs to become a fall 2026 planning conversation rather than something programs discover in December 2026.
What AB 310 Actually Changed
California Assembly Bill 310 amends the state's Nevaeh Youth Sports Safety Act, and it reaches further than most programs assume. The statute applies to every youth sports organization, and that definition explicitly includes local government agencies that sponsor or conduct amateur athletic competitions, training, camps, or clubs for participants seventeen and under. In plain terms: a city parks and recreation department running a summer basketball league is a youth sports organization under this law, even though it may not think of itself as one. So is a county-run swim program, a school-district-affiliated club that operates outside the school's own athletics department, and a private club league that leases a city's fields.
This matters because compliance planning tends to start with the organizations that obviously fit the label — club sports associations, private youth leagues — and skip past the municipal and county programs that technically qualify but don't see themselves in the definition until an audit or a parent's question catches them out. If your organization sponsors, conducts, or contracts out amateur athletic activity for minors, AB 310 is written to include you.
The January 1, 2027 Requirements, In Detail
Two separate obligations take effect on this date, and both apply to every coach working with participants seventeen and under:
Coach certification. Every coach must be certified in both CPR and AED operation. This is not a one-time credential: certification must be renewed at least every two years, which means organizations need a tracking system, not just a filing cabinet. A roster of coaches certified in 2025 does nothing for a program if half of them lapse in 2027 and nobody catches it until an incident forces the question.
A written cardiac emergency response plan. Every organization must adopt a written plan, and the plan is where most of the actual compliance work lives. At minimum, a compliant plan needs to:
Name the specific locations where AEDs are kept for each venue the organization uses, including away venues if the organization controls the equipment brought to them. Assign clear responsibilities — who checks the device, who is trained to retrieve and use it, who calls emergency services, and who manages the athlete's family and other participants during an event. Be shared with parents on an annual basis, which means the plan can't just exist in a binder in an athletic director's office; it needs a distribution mechanism built into every season's registration or onboarding process.
Read that requirement closely and a sequencing problem becomes obvious: the plan has to name AED locations. If your organization doesn't have AEDs in hand yet, you cannot write a compliant plan in 2026, because there's nothing to name. That's the detail most programs are going to miss.
The January 1, 2028 Equipment Requirement — And Why It's a 2026 Project
One year later, on January 1, 2028, the equipment requirement takes effect: an AED must be available at every official practice and match, maintained according to the manufacturer's specifications. Read in isolation, that looks like a 2027 problem. Read alongside the plan requirement above, it isn't.
Because the written plan must name device locations and the plan is due a full year before the equipment technically has to be in place, any organization planning to write its cardiac emergency response plan close to the January 2027 deadline will be naming AEDs it doesn't own yet. The practical fix is to pull the equipment decision forward by a year: source, place, and register the devices in 2026, write the plan around real locations, and treat 2027 as the year the plan gets exercised and refined rather than the year the hardware shows up.
For municipal parks and recreation departments, city-run leagues, JPA members, private clubs, and school-affiliated programs that haven't budgeted for this, that reframes AB 310 from a 2027 compliance item into a fall 2026 budgeting conversation. Most public agencies commit fourth-quarter funds in October and November for the following year. An agency that waits until Q1 2027 to request AED funding has already missed the window that would let it comply on time.
Building the Cardiac Emergency Response Plan, Section by Section
A compliant plan is not a single paragraph of boilerplate. Treat it as a document with distinct, necessary sections:
Device inventory and location. A list of every AED the organization owns or has access to, matched to the specific venue, room, or sideline location where it's kept during practices and games. Off-site venues need the same specificity as home facilities — a plan that says "AEDs available at all locations" without naming them will not hold up to scrutiny.
Roles and responsibilities. Name the individuals or positions responsible for monthly device checks, for retrieving the device during an emergency, for administering CPR and operating the AED, and for calling 911 and directing emergency responders to the scene. Vague responsibility ("coaching staff will handle it") is a common failure point; a plan that survives a real emergency assigns responsibility to specific roles.
Communication and escalation. What happens in the first sixty seconds after a collapse. Who is alerted, in what order, and how information reaches the sideline, the front office, and emergency services simultaneously rather than sequentially.
Annual parent notification. The plan must be shared with parents every year. Build this into registration paperwork or a season-opening packet rather than treating it as a separate mailing that's easy to skip.
AED location announcement. Beyond the written plan itself, coaches and staff at each venue should be able to state, without checking a document, where the nearest AED is. A plan that lives only on paper does not help in the moment it matters.
Placement and Readiness in Practice
The equipment requirement raises a practical question every program will need to answer for itself: how many units does an organization actually need? The honest answer depends on how spread out the organization's venues are and how quickly a device can reach an athlete in distress.
A single facility with all practices and games on adjacent fields may be well served by two or three placed units plus a portable option for away games. A program that operates across multiple parks, gyms, or school sites — which describes most municipal recreation departments — needs a device, or a realistic plan to bring one, everywhere participants gather. The test to apply is travel time: from the moment a coach recognizes a cardiac emergency, how long does it take a person to retrieve the AED and return to the athlete? Every added minute meaningfully reduces the chance of a good outcome, which is precisely why the plan has to name locations rather than describe a general policy.
Off-site and away-game coverage deserves its own line item. If your organization travels to venues it does not control, the compliance question becomes whether your program brings its own portable AED or relies on the host venue having one, and whether that host venue's device and location are documented in your plan at all.
Minnesota Is Already Doing This
California is not the first state to require a written cardiac emergency response plan for youth sports. Minnesota's own school-based cardiac emergency response plan mandate took effect with the 2026–27 school year, under Minn. Stat. 121A.241. The Minnesota rollout is useful precisely because it's not hypothetical: districts that treated the plan and the equipment as a single project, built early, were in compliance when the school year opened. Districts that waited were scrambling in August to write plans around AEDs that hadn't arrived. California's youth sports programs are looking at the same sequencing problem, on a similar timeline, and Minnesota is the closest available preview of how it plays out for organizations that wait.
Pennsylvania, South Carolina, and Texas now have school or athletics-related cardiac emergency response plan mandates in force or phasing in as well, which suggests this requirement is becoming a standard feature of youth sports regulation rather than a California-specific rule. A plan and a compliance process built now has a reasonable chance of being reusable if your organization operates across state lines or if similar requirements reach additional states.
A Compliance Checklist: Now Through January 2028
For an organization without dedicated compliance or risk-management staff — which describes most youth sports programs and many municipal recreation departments — AED program management tends to fall to whoever already owns facilities, safety, or athletics administration. A simple, dated checklist keeps the work visible even without a formal program:
Fall 2026: Inventory current AEDs and venues. Identify gaps between where devices are and where practices and games actually happen, including off-site and away venues. Request budget for any additional units as part of the fourth-quarter cycle most public agencies use for the following year.
Late 2026 into early 2027: Place and register devices at named locations. Draft the written cardiac emergency response plan against those real locations. Confirm every coach's CPR/AED certification status and flag anyone whose certification will lapse before the two-year renewal window closes.
January 1, 2027: Coach certification and the written plan are both due. Distribute the plan to parents as part of the year's registration process.
Through 2027: Exercise the plan. Run through the response sequence with staff at least once per season so the plan is a practiced procedure, not a filed document. Track certification renewals so no coach quietly lapses mid-season.
January 1, 2028: AEDs must be available and maintained to specification at every official practice and match.
AED Professionals works with municipal recreation departments, school-affiliated programs, and private youth sports clubs on exactly this kind of dated, practical compliance planning — sourcing the right number and type of devices for a program's actual footprint, and helping build a written plan around real, named locations rather than generic language. If your organization is trying to work out where it stands against these two dates, that's a conversation worth having well before the fourth-quarter budget cycle closes.
