In the upcoming Mounds View Quad meet, the decision was made to
score 4 heets in the shorter, non-relay running events. Mounds View
has a 9-lane track, and 4 doesn't divide evenly into 9, so the
question arose about how to seed the heats in an unlimited entry meet
early in the year when meaningful times for the athletes aren't yet
available.
Ross Fleming decided that the each school would get 2 runners in each
heat, and Mounds View, being the home school with more competitors,
would get an extra runner in each heat, with this extra runner always
being in lane 9. I thought this would be a snap to do in HyTek's
Meet Manager. For example, for the first heat I'd give the #1 runners
from each school one time, the #2 runners from each school a slightly
slower time, and the #3 runner from Mounds View an even slower time.
Then, I could let Meet Manager seed the heat - the #1 runners would
be randomly assigned to the 4 lanes in the middle of the track (3-6),
the #2 runners would get lanes 1-2 and 7-8, with the #3 runner from
Mounds View being assigned lane 9.
Much to my surprise, Meet Manager did not seed the heat that way. From
its point of view (embedded in the "Standard Lanes" definition),
the least favorable
lane on a 9-lane track is not lane 9, it is lane 1, so that is where
the #3 Mounds View runner ended up. There isn't any great problem here,
once one realizes that one can use "Custom Lanes" to get the desired
configuration. Basically what I did was to replicate the Standard Lane
set up for an 8-lane track in the 9-lane definition, then tacked on
lane 9 as the least favorable lane.
Using Judges Decision to Resolve Ties [20060512]
When there are "ties" in Meet Manager that are not really ties, these
can be resolved by clicking on the JD button (JD for Judges Decision).
In the screen that appears, one can resolve the ties by manually
inputting the place that each "tied" competitor should receive (based
upon the event-specific tie resolution procedure) or by inputting the
points that each competitor should receive. The former approach
results in reports that are easier to understand, but each can lead
to the same, appropriate team score.
Converting from Synthetic Competitor Numbers to Actual Numbers
in Meet Manager
[20060511]
For the 2006 true team sectional, we used synthetic athletes since the
actual competitor numbers would not reach the press box in time to be
input during the course of the meet for the running events. There are
a few things to keep in mind when, after the fact, one changes the
synthetic competitor numbers (e.g., 9501 "Unspecified, Athlete1" to
167 "Smith, Frank" for Irondale).
One wants to check carefully that the new competitor numbers are
correct. The idea is that we are changing from an unspecified athlete
for a school to a named athlete for that school. That is what we
are trying to do, but Meet Manager doesn't know this. It will prevent
us from using a competitor number that has not been assigned, and it
will prevent us from using a competitor number of the wrong gender.
But, if we change competitor number 9351 to 962 (changing from an
unspecified athlete from Minneapolis Roosevelt to a named athlete from
Roseville, Meet Manager will not complain. Thus, after updating the
competitor numbers, again getting the times and rescoring the event,
one should check to see that the team scores have not changed.
In updating competitor numbers, one needs to be particularly careful
with runners who got DQ'd. If the fact of their having been DQ'd
was noted by the operators of the timing system, then there will be
no problem. However, if the disqualification was not noted until after
the timing results had been sent over to Meet Manager, then when you
again get the times after updating the competitor numbers, you will
have a competitor without a time and will spend a bit of effort before
you figure out what happened. Thus, before jumping in to update the
competitor numbers for a heat, it is prudent to look at the screen to
note any disqualifications before getting started.
Synthetic Athletes in Meet Manager
[20060510]
For the 2006 true team sectional, we used synthetic athletes since the
actual athletes' competitor numbers would not be available until they
checked in for the event. We used names such as:
Unspecified, Athlete1
Unspecified, Athlete2
Unspecified, Athlete3
In working with the athletes to get them in the proper lanes in their
heats, it was often hard to distinguish Athlete1 from Athlete2
from Athlete3. Things would have worked much better, I believe, if the
synthetic athlete names had been slightly different:
Unspecified, Athlete1
Unspecified, Athlete 2
Unspecified, Athlete 3
Getting Hy-Tek's Meet Manager to Run
[20060510]
At yesterday's true team meet, when I brought up Meet Manager and
went directly to "Run", I would get an error and Meet Manager would
have to be shut down. But, when I brought it up again and tried to
go to "Run", the same thing would happen. The trick here is to do
something else, before going to "Run". For example, go to "Events",
pick an event to edit, then cancel the editing. This seems to get
enough ducks lined up to allow things to work.
Communicating a Heat That Has Been Re-Seeded to FinishLynx
[20060503]
At today's meet, Bruce Whiting clarified that if one makes changes to
a heat, for example by re-seeding it, this change won't be automatically picked up by the timing system. To get the timing system to become
aware of the update, you need to take an action in Meet Manager.
From the Run screen, click on Interfaces, then click on
Photo Finish - FinishLynx File Sharing Mode, then click on
Update Start Lists. Follow the instructions on the dialog that
pops up, then click OK. The Start Lists will be updated, meaning
the timing system will now be aware of the new heat structure.
Getting Times When a Heat Has Not Been Populated With Entries
[20060503]
At today's meet, Bruce Whiting showed what one can do when a heat has
been run with more competitors than are listed in Meet Manager for that
heat. When you click "Get Times" from the Run screen for that heat,
you will only get back times for the lanes for which Meet Manager lists
entries. Suppose you want to print out a page showing all the times?
This can be accomplished by bringing up the Windows File Explorer,
navigating to the directory where the results are being shared between
Meet Manager and the timing system (typically c:\tfmeets). In that
directory, you should see a file of results for each heat that has been
captured by the timing system. These are the files with a Type
of "FinishLynx Event". Double click on the file for the heat you are
interested in, and FinishLynx will come up for that heat. The pane
in the upper right will show each captured time, along with lane #
(hip #) and
place within that heat. If you click the printer icon in that pane,
you can print the results.
Getting Data Out of Meet Manager [20060501]
When you create a report in Meet Manager, it is all setup to send
it to the printer. But, you have the opporunity to save the data
in a variety of formats by clicking on an icon that looks like an
arrow going into an envelope. I explored some of these options today
in looking into taking the athlete rosters, with their assigned
competitor numbers, and putting the information up on our true
team sectional web site.
There were several options that looked initially promising, but didn't
pan out. The first was the option of saving the report as HTML
(HTML 3.2 Standard). This seemed promising, since I want to display
the data as HTML. But, the file contained a wealth of very detailed
formatting, essentially making the report both very wide and inflexible.
I then tried tab separated values, but when I looked at the output
file I saw that every field was embedded in quotes, and every record
contained the full blither about who Meet Manager was licensed to,
the name and date of the meet, etc. Way more crap that one would
want to deal with. I then looked at an output format called "Text",
which is pretty easy to work with. There are a few lines of header
at the top, and one line with a total roster count at the bottom, but
the meat of the file in the middle looks pretty easy to work with. Will
be easy to manipulate into HTML and put on the web site.
File Sharing Between Meet Manager and FinishLynx [20060428]
One way that Hy-Tek's Meet Manager and FinishLynx can comminicate
is through a shared drive. This is the way we have been trying to
run things, and our approach has been to have a shared folder on the
machine running Meet Manager (i.e., c:\tfmeets). Yesterday's
experience offers circumstantial evidence, really strong
circumstantial evidence, that it is vital that all extra junk be
cleared out of this directory, particularly timing results from a
prior meet.
Metric v. English in Events Definition [20060420]
In defining events in Meet Manager, you need to be careful
with the choice between Metric and English. For running
events, you want the events to be defined as Metric. That is, you are
setting up the 200 Meter Dash, not the 200 Yard Dash. But, when you
get to Field Events, you want the events to be defined as English.
You want them to be defined as English, so you can input and report
distances in the way high school meets are traditionally run, in
English units. You want to be able to talk about a Long Jump of
21 feet 9 inches, not something on the order of 6.70 meters.
Entering Competitor #'s into Heat Results [20060419]
Most (if not all) of the meets for which we might want to emply
Meet Manager do
not have the fully seeded feature that Meet Manager is grooved for.
For our meets, the best we can expect is to get the competitor number
for each entrant in each heat. For races less than 800 meters, this
would be a competitor number for each lane for each heat.
This looked like an attractive way to get each heat set up to recieve
the timing resutls. We type in the competitor #, and Meet Manager
fills in the athlete's name and school fields. And, we get the
competitor #'s from the Clerk of the Meet.
I thought this was the way to use Meet Manager,
until I happened to notice that after I put a competitor #
in a field, and left that field, I couldn't go back and change
it. Charlie Hodgson from Hy-Tek passed along that the way you correct
problems like this is by double clicking on the name, rather than the
competitor #. This little insight would appear to go a long way in
allowing us to use Meet Manager to score an unseeded meet while using
athletes' names in the reports.
Notice that the above approach, not knowing which athletes are in which
events (and which heats within an event) still sits a trifle crosswise
with Meet Manager. Without knowing which athletes are in a running
event,
Meet Manager provides just a single heat for that event. A True Team
meet would require three heats for large schools. Thus, for events
needing more than one heat, the prudent thing to do is to go into
events, seed an event,
clicks the Add Heat button. Appreciate that a heat will not
be visible when you try to input the timings and score the event
unless there is at least one athlete in the heat. Thus, we
need to pre-populate certain events with "dummy competitors" to be
sure we have the proper number of heats for each running event. The
reason we want to get this set up in advance is simply to minimize
the volume of stuff we need to do when the meet is underway.
Importing Entries from a File [20060411]
I recently became aware that one can import athletes, or better
yet entries, from a semicolon delimited file. Hy-Tek documents the
format for these files, but no longer actively supports them. This
input strategy does work, however, and it makes it quite easy to
put in an entire team. The brute force method, copying/pasting from
an e-mail, can take forever. The semicolon delimited files have a
very rigid format, but I have written a script that will take the
kind of roster input provided by a coach, and turn it into the input
that Hy-Tek will accept.
While one could use this approach to put a team's roster of athletes
into Hy-Tek Meet Manager, it is better to use a variation on this
approach to enter the athletes into each of the events. Meet Manager
won't allow you to enter results for an athlete for a particular
event unless that athlete is elgible for that event. For
open entry meets, the prudent thing to do is to enter every athlete in
every event (for that athlete's gender). All this really does it to
make an athlete elgible to enter any event the coach happens to put
them in. This just makes things run
smoother. It would be a pain to do by hand, but reading in the entries
from a file that was generated by a script makes it a snap.
There is a wrinkle here that one should be aware of. When you define
a running event, a basic running event, it can be a Dash or a
Run. There is a undocumented wrinkle when importing entries
from a file - you must make sure that basic running events longer than
400 meters are defined to be a Run. If you inadvertenlty make
them a Dash, you won't be able to import entries into those longer
events.
Enlish Units for Field Events [20060331]
While it appears that there are a number of things that one can go
back and later correct in Meet Manager, my experience has been that
it is important to get field events to be defined to use English
measurements from the start. It appears that if I got a
field event defined to use metric for input/reporting, I was
be unable to rectify that later. Best to get this right up front.
Importance of "Sessions" [20060331]
Meet Manager has the concepts of a meet, events, schools and athletes -
no great suprise here. But, it also has the concept of a "session",
which may not be as intuitively obvious. Some high school meets are
run in two sessions (e.g., conference, region, and state). That is on
one day they run all the preliminaries and conduct the finals in a few
events. On a subsequent day, they hold all of the remaining finals.
From the perspective of Meet Manager, these represent two sessions.
For a more typical high school meet, held entirely on a single day,
Meet Manager views this as a meet run as a single session. As a
consequence of this, one needs to define a session and move all
the events into that session. This is done by clicking on
Events, then clicking on the Sessions button.
Assigning Competitor Numbers [20060331]
If one is using the Competitor Number feature in Meet Manager,
then it is likely that one would want to have the numbers assigned in
blocks. That is, all the athletes from school x have numbers in
the 300's, while numbers in the 400's belong to athletes from school y.
There are two ways to do this - assign the numbers in blocks from the
start, or perform a renumbering after the athletes have been entered
into Meet Manager (but before the meet starts). The former is done by
setting the Competitor# field on the athlete input dialog to the
appropriate starting number (e.g., 300) when beginning to input
athletes from a different school. Unfortunately, it is easy to forget
to this, so you have the competitor numbers from one school blending
right into the numbers of another school. Fortunately, Meet Manager
provides a way to straighten this out, via the Comp# button
on the dialog that appears when one clicks on Athletes from the menu
bar. After clicking on the Comp# button, put in an appropriate
Starting Number, select the school you want from the Team drop down
list, and click OK. Performing the above steps for each school will
get the numbers assigned properly.