This is a breakthrough season for rankings in Pennslylvana – and on the 30-state MileSplit.US Network. But with growth and change, come some issues. Take a few minutes to review this announcement, and then share it with a coach or meet director who you think would/could/should benefit from it. I'll cover two things: 1) Why some meets have ALL performances in the database rankings, and why others only have a few, and 2), what you can do to make things better.
1. Meet results come in many formats. The ones you often see that look like 'real' meet results, use the meet management program called HyTek. Hytek makes incredible software for Track & Field and Swimming, and is used by a lot of people because of the powerful tools it has and because it gives a nice, clean presentation of results. For us at the MileSplit.US Network, it gives us something else.
Because the format is consistent, and we can write a part of our overall proprietary software to analyze the results, we are able to semi-automate the process of rankings. As you may have noticed this season, for the first time we are making the attempt to put ALL performances into the rankings from any meet reported in HyTek format. It is not totally automatic, but it is as close as you can get. The average meet takes us about ten-15 minutes to process. This innovation was the brainchild of our founder and developer, Jason Byrne of FLrunners.com. It is his software than enables each of our webmasters to look like we're five people – when in fact, we're just one.
So, HyTek is good. Good for the sport, and good for rankings.
But results in any format are good, as well. Simply because we believe that as many meets and performances should be publicized as possible.
But when it comes to rankings, anything that is not in HyTek (keep reading for another option), has to be processed manually. That is simply because there is no predictable way to write a program to analyze results that come in many formats, many designs, and with abbreviatons and marks that are consistent only in that they belong to a track meet.
With more than 250 invitationals in PA alone this season, and only a handful of meets reporting results in HyTek from week to week, that simply means we have thousands and thousands of performances. And because we have many other things to do to keep the site and network running, we have to limit the amount of entries we can enter by hand to be added to the rankings. The cut-off is called the PennTrackXC Elite Standards.
As you might guess, that becomes a daunting list. And for the first month or so of the season – with the help of my son and wife – we were able to keep up with the manual entry of all these marks. But there are more meets than ever, and most meets do not come in HyTek format. So during the 25-meet weekend of the Penn Relays, we finally fell behind on manual entry.
Keep in mind that we have to go through each meet to "pull" the elite marks we then use to write summaries and add to the rankings. This takes time as well.
The bottom line is, there are currently (as of May 6) over 2,500 performances to be entered into the rankings from the previous two weekends.
We look through these for marks that crack the top 10 in the state, and immediately enter those by hand. About 20 or so were added just from the Baldwin meet this morning. All the rest will have to wait until my part-time help gets to them (oldest to newest), and it may not be until June. if you know a top-10 mark we missed for a meet that is posted on the site, let me know and I'll add it.
And while i was writing this, there are about seven meets i still have to find results for from last weekend, and results coming in for meets that occured yesterday that also have to be processed.
Now, an alternative.
2. RaceTab. RaceTab is a meet manager program designed to perform the basic tasks of running a meet, including reporting results. It was developed by Jason Byrne, and is currently in late-beta release.
Results from RaceTab can be processed just like HyTek results, meaning that we can post ALL performances in just a few minutes.
RaceTab is not designed to replace HyTek. It is designed to give smaller meets the opportunity to look like big meets, and to make the process easier.
The basic program for 100 or few athletes is free. You can try it out and even use it on your dual meets. It also works for Road Races and Cross Country.
The full version for an unlimited number of athletes is $100. That's it.
You can read about RaceTab features here.
To download the program, click here.
For tutorials on RaceTab, click here.
For support, click here.
So there you have it. I hope you understand why we (I) can't get it all done. And now you know a way to make it better for all of us – including those who deserve to have their performances in the rankings; and on their athlete profile page; just like the top performers do.
Let me know if you have any questions... now, back to work.