A Private Girls 2019 State at Berry (photo Dan McCauley)
Hello all, I hope you have been enjoying this Outdoor track season thus far. So far, the weather up in the metro ATL, surrounding suburbs, east, west, and northward for Georgia has been wetter and colder than usual. Someone mentioned to me there was some snow at a meet Saturday... As we begin to accelerate into the busiest time of the season for meets until most school system's Spring breaks, we need to review some basic protocols for timing and results.
If you self-post meet results before 11 pm, they will get parsed into the MileSplit database and populate into their destinations overnight, including athlete profiles, team pages, rankings, etc. Meet results posted later than this will be attended to by noon the next day. I'm also a Timer, so there are weekdays I may be out of office' from 2-10 pm. Results and data are the first priority when I'm back in the office, as MileSplit Georgia has largely been a data-driven site for many years...
I would like to remind all Meet Directors that hand-time meets when you submit or post your results on the Meet Page, you MUST inform us those were timed with hand-held devices. This can greatly affect the individual and team 'power rankings' in events. This also can affect seeding at events you enter into and especially REGION championships.
As I was compiling February 'Athletes of the Month', there were several meets that had questionable 100 meter dash times (after viewing athlete's PRs) and I went back in adjusted the results accordingly with the standard 'hand-held adjustments of rounding up to the next tenth of a second and then adding .24 If you are a rural outlying school, and there is no Timer attached to your meet results it will be called into question.
These adjustments will affect the following events in the MileSplit database:
100-meter dash
100-meter hurdles (girls)
110-meter hurdles (boys)
200-meter dash
300-meter hurdles
400-meter dash
4x100 meter relay
Of course, FAT is also the way to go for events longer than 400 meters, especially when finishes are razor-thin close and athletes can possibly be separated by thousands of a second!
On a different note, there have been questions about schools using the 'Sprint-Timer' app at meets for timing. Let me remind you, this device has to be started by a 'person' pushing a button, just like a stopwatch, and is not going to be fully accurate and FAT like Finish Lynx. I've heard stories of coaches shooting races many meters away from the finish line with this app. It's better than a stopwatch I guess, but it is what it is...
Professional timers spend many thousands of dollars on their FAT equipment, and that is to ensure results are accurate to help maintain the integrity of the Sport. Phil Logan of the Perfect Timing Group set the standard for accuracy, and timers he has personally trained over the years, including Fast Feet Timing led by Karl Brust and Bruce Taylor, have strived for accuracy first and foremost.
I would urge every school/coach in a rural area to compete in at least one invitational that has FAT (Fully Automatic Timing) before your region meets. You may need to go to your AD to explain this to get the funds to compete at an invitational. Per the GHSA, all Region meets now must use FAT timing and Hy Tek Meet Manager to streamline the meet setup of the Sectional Qualifiers.
It's also a much better use of one's time to download RaceTab Meet Manager and utilize this FREE tool created by the founder of MileSplit, none other than Jason Byrne who now works with FloSports than put your results in an excel spreadsheet. Please, download RaceTab and use it for meets you host that are hand-held timed. Your results will sync quickly into the database this way. If you are a school that hosts a lot of meets, you can get Hy Tek meet manager for $250 per year.
In conclusion, true FAT is best, let us know if your meet used hand-held timing and download RaceTab Meet Manager and utilize it instead of a spreadsheet to report hand-held meet results, please? Thanks!