Observations

• Seeding Longer Races [20060514]
  
  In the future, if the decision is ever made to seed the longer races (i.e., the 800, 1600, 3200) the way it was done this year, and then to portray those seedings online, it would be useful to have a version of the diagram online, so that people would have an understanding of what it means to be in Position 6.

• Hy-Tek's Meet Manager Protects You, Sort Of [20060513]
  
  Meet Manager will alert you if you have a time/distance for an event that is wildly implausible. One should appreciate, however, that a value can be incredibly goofy and still be acceptable to Meet Manager. For example, the range of acceptable times for the 4x400 Relay is 2 minutes to 24 minutes. Thus, Meet Manager will only prevent you from using an incredibly incorrect performance values. Visual inspection of the reports would be warranted.

• Check in Forms for Longer Races [20060510]
  
  For yesterday's meet we used checkin in forms for the longer races (800, 1600, 3200) that were not generated by Meet Manager. These forms, which came from Excel, had 3 columns:
  
  
  • Position
  • School
  • Competitor #
  
  The form was sent to the Clerk with the first two columns filled in, and the expectation was that the Clerk would fill in the third column, Competitor #. There were a few instances where the Competitor # was not appropriate for the School in that row. That is, if the School value was "IR" (for Irondale), then the acceptable Competitor #'s had to be in the 100's. Consequently, a more thoughtful form would have had the Competitor # field for that row containing something like:
  
  1____

• Track Web Sites and Frames [20060510]
  
  Got an e-mail today from a coach who was having trouble printing results from yesterday's true team meet, the results being on the web site we set up for that meet. The problem was that frames were being used. Perhaps a more thoughtful approach would have been to bring up pages that people could be likely to want to print (e.g., rosters with competitor numbers and results) in a separate window rather than in a frame in the current window.

• Roster/Entry Input to Hy-Tek Meet Manager [20060426]
  
  Earlier this week Aaron Redman shared with me the instructions that the Irondale coach received for a meet in Hudson, Wisconsin. Hudson was going to be using Hy-Tek's Meet Manager, and they were requiring roster, event entries and performance data to be provided from Hy-Tek's Team Manager or Team Manager Lite. These programs seems to be a fairly painful way to input the data; it reportedly took the Irondale coach two hours.
  
  The input strategy used by Lakeville seems to impose less of a burden, as Scott Ylkanen verified. If we are going to run a meet with Hy-Tek's Meet Manager and need performance data for seeding, I propose we ask for the data in the format used by Lakeville North. That data won't go directly into Meet Manager, but it can be easily manipulated with a script so that it can be read in via Meet Manager's ability to import semi-colon delimited roster entries. Moreover, if a Mounds View team is going to a meet with requirements like the one in Hudson, we should generate a semi-colon delimited file for the meet to use as input.

• Hy-Tek Meet Results vs. RaceberryJaM [20060425]
  
  Hy-Tek's Meet Manager shows the event results in "meet order" (4x800, 110HH, 100M, etc.) while RaceberryJaM shows them in "logical order" (100, 200, 400, etc.). RaceberryJaM includes intra-report navigation, so with one click you can jump to the results of a specific event. RaceberryJaM includes the team scores at the bottom of the meet report.
  
  The issue of which order to present the results (meet order versus logical order) is essentially arbitrary. On the other hand, seeing the team scores as well as intra-report navigation seem like really helpful things to have (particularly the team scores). Consequently, I have figured out how to augment the meet results from Hy-Tek to includes these two features. It only takes a modest amount of effort to augment a Meet Manager report in these ways, particularly using an HTML preprocessor such as PPWIZARD.

• Lakeville's Input Format for Seeded Entries [20060412]
  
  Basic plot - Lakeville sends you an e-mail that contains the events, you reply in a very stylized way to give them input they can use directly. What follows is their e-mail:
  
  All entrys must have a seed performance. Please follow the directions exactly as they are listed below!
  
  Here's the Girls list of events:
  
  >100 METER DASH
  >200 METER DASH
  >400 METER DASH
  >800 METER RUN
  >1600 METER RUN
  >3200 METER RUN
  >100 METER HURDLES
  >300 METER HURDLES
  >4X100 METER RELAY
  >800 METER RELAY
  >4X400 METER RELAY
  >4X800 METER RELAY
  >LONG JUMP
  >TRIPLE JUMP
  >SHOT PUT
  >DISCUS THROW
  >HIGH JUMP
  >POLE VAULT
  
  
  Here is the Boys list of events:
  
  >100 METER DASH
  >200 METER DASH
  >400 METER DASH
  >800 METER RUN
  >1600 METER RUN
  >3200 METER RUN
  >110 METER HURDLES
  >300 METER HURDLES
  >4X100 METER RELAY
  >800 METER RELAY
  >4X400 METER RELAY
  >4X800 METER RELAY
  >LONG JUMP
  >TRIPLE JUMP
  >SHOT PUT
  >DISCUS THROW
  >HIGH JUMP
  >POLE VAULT
  
  
  To make your entries, select all of this message and hit the 'reply' button. PLEASE DO NOT RETYPE THE LINES WITH THE EVENT NAMES OR MESS WITH THE >'S IN FRONT OF THEM!
  
  Type your entries (one line to an entry) BELOW the appropriate event name (NOT on the same line as the event name) in the following format:
  
  name (first name first), performance. Separate the name and performance with a comma.
  
  For example,
  
  >>100 METER DASH
  James Smith, 10.96
  TaFred Jones, 11.01
  >>200 METER DASH
  Bill Anderson, 23.56
  Note the commas.
  
  >>Discus Throw Tim Kasper, 188-0
  
  

• Relays in RaceberryJam [20060412, updated 20060416]
  
  If you look at the relays for a high school meet at RaceberryJaM.com, you will see there are 4:
  
  
  • 4X100
  • 800 RELAY
  • 4X400
  • 4X800
  
  The 800 RELAY has a different style name from the others. Jack Moran's explanation for this: "My software would then want to print out times like 93.33."
  
  If you look at the results of a meet at Park High School, run by Jim Beecroft (e.g., Meet Results), you will see that they have listed the relay as the 4X200. The price they pay for this is having those relay results look like this:
  
  4x200M Relay
   1    Henry Sibley        98.77
   2    Park              1:43.57
   3    Prior Lake        1:43.96
   4    Prior Lake        1:44.94
   5    Henry Sibley      1:54.14

  I think it is better to have the relay name be correct; the effort to edit a time like "98.77" to display as "1:38.77" is trivial.
  

This page last updated on 14-May-2006