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As a long time meet director, I have seen many changes in the entry process and the logistics of organizing and running off a cross country or track meet. I will keep this article about the changes in cross country.
Entry in to cross country has changed from a meet director responsibility to the coach's responsibility. Entries and meet information prior to online and internet was sent out by US mail to the schools. The coach at the school wrote the entries on the enclosed entry form and had to return mail (or some cases fax) the entry so that it was received by the entry deadline. This, of course had it problems. The cost to the meet director for stamps and the cost of printing information sheets and entry forms. When I was in charge of the coaches classic cross country meet in those days, it would cost a couple of hundred dollars just to get the information to the 200+ schools in the state. Then you have the problem of some coach arriving at the meet saying he mailed his entry, but we did not get it. remember that there was no quick way to show a coach that the entry or fee had arrived at the host school. They would have to call if they were not sure, which meant that the race director was getting quite a few calls leading up to the event, causing even more time to put it on. Once the entry arrived, the schools, names and sex for XC had to be typed into the computer program. Once names were in the computer, numbers were assigned and bib labels were printed and put on the numbers (like is done now). The team packets are put together with safety pins and other info, like box numbers and course maps.
Video: B-Tag chip timing explained
Before computers did the scoring, most of the pre-race details were avoided, because you had to have a different way of doing the meet. Meet directors would collect information after the finish of the athletes in various ways. Cards or popsicle sticks with the finish number on it was handed to each athlete in the order they finished. Either the athlete or the coach had to turn this card/stick into a scoring table where volunteers wrote the athletes name and school on a sheet of paper beside the number that represented their place. Again this created problems. Getting the cards collected was the largest one; many sets of results have blanks from athletes that did not return their cards. If the athlete was in the scoring seven, then the meet director had to go search for who was missing, many times not getting that information and the scores being wrong. Then there was the time involved of writing all of the names, schools and times on the score sheet. Times were collected early on by using sheets of paper called tic sheets. The sheet was columns of numbers; each column was a minute and the blocks below it represented the seconds within that minute. When an athlete crossed the finish line the timers would put a check mark in the box of the corresponding time. Big meets was a challenge for the timers to find the correct time on the sheet, count the number of athletes cross within that second and making sure that a mark was made for each of the athletes. Then these times had to be collected and written on the score sheet. In the mid 80’s electronic stopwatches began to have printers with them making timing much easier even though you still had to write them on the score sheet.
Then you had to score the meet going through each runner’s school and assign their team score. Hopefully, you knew of the schools that did not start five runners and you could displace them from the beginning, but many times you would get through the sheet only to find some school did not finish five and you would have to go through the sheet again, changing the team places leaving out those that did not get a team place. Add the scores and put the teams in the correct finishing order completed the scoring process.
After scoring was complete, you had to get the results to the schools that attended. Early on, we had NCR paper, paper with multiple copies underneath so that when you wrote on the top one it went on through the copies beneath. This was OK for smaller meets and every coach could have a copy. If not, then the meet director would have to go make copies immediately to give the coaches or mail them out the next day. When I scored the State Cross Country Championships in the 90’s, I would get a copier and a crew of my JV athletes to make copies for every school for them to pick up after the awards ceremony. I took most of them home. Then I started making the coaches sign up for a set of results when they arrived and I could minimize the number of copies I had made. I still took home more than I gave out, so I quit making copies.
In the mid 80’s, I was tired of doing the scoring by hand and saw the possibility of computers doing more of the work. A student/athlete of mine was an amateur programming and for over a year he and I worked together to write what became the first scoring program used for the State Championships. We practiced on some home meets and the Furman Invitational. It was extremely slow by today’s standard, but still much faster and more accurate than the old method. We still had to type times into the computer for a few year until we finally programed a timer that fed the times into the computer program. A lot of work shad to go into the prerace organization like typing all of the information into the program. We started with Apple IIe (a desktop)and Apple IIc (a laptop). Eventually, we changed over to PC’s. We used the program and its updates for every State Championship, Furman Invitational, NCAA District III Meet, many Eastside home meets and even two NCAA Division I National Championships in 1997 and 2001. After 2001, the student, now married and with kids, stopped helping us and Hy-Tek became the program of choice for many of the schools, so we changed also. The old program had many advantages over even the current Hy-Tek like being able to put any information on the label that is attached to the runner’s bib.
The last big obstacle was data entry. The first challenge is from the paper entry that coaches sent in and had to be typed. I would have parents come to my classroom and type entries into the computer. Finally, one parent said there had to be a better way and wrote an online entry that any coach in the state could access and very easily enter into our meets. There were others, but they were (are) harder to use and they cost the meet director money to use them. Our program costs only if the race is for profit and we use it free of charge for all state qualifying and the state meet, as well as many Region Championships and many school’s home meets for free. A few minutes of time takes hours of pre-meet data input out of the directors hand. And it eliminates the “You spelled my kid’s name wrong.” Problem away from the meet director and puts it in the hands of the coach. At the meet we are still forced to type the bib numbers in order of finish, but the stopwatches are optically read by the computer and the Hy-Tek program will match the times with the runner. Bar code readers are often used by some directors, but I find them slower than typing although the bar code eliminates typing errors. Now the chip does all of it for us. The cost of chips is still much more than anything but huge meets can afford and the hardware to own by a school is tens of thousands of dollars, an expenses that no school in SC has tried to take on.
Results have also improved. No longer are we making copies. Most meets can have their results put on internet sites like SCRunners.com. At most large meets, these results can even be uploaded soon after the results are tabulated for everyone to see. And this same site puts the results into a database where queries from the user can do all sorts of possibilities, like virtual meets and individual record keeping.
Today, with stopwatches that can be downloaded or chips that can collect data, and programs that do the scoring and online entries that can be downloaded in seconds, cross country scoring has become a very easy part of a meet. It has been an evolution and mixture of techniques and technology. Each director has his/her own way of running a meet that suits their needs. Backups are very important regardless of the method. Filming of finishes is recommended to eliminate any doubt of errors.
Ed Boehmke is a longtime coach, meet director and serves as an officer in the South Carolina Track and Cross Country Coaches Association.