CROSS COUNTRY SCORING

THE PHYSICS SUPERMARKET

A set of Excel spreadsheet files have been developed that makes it very simple to record the finishing order and scoring of points at a Cross Country meeting. It can be set up for an individual school or for several schools completing against each other.

The system is based on assigning a unique number to each athlete and have this number stored in a Lookup table. Each School/House Group within a school creates their section of the Lookup table and these are emailed and combined. Traditionally runners have a wrist tag which shows their name, age and School/House Group and this is put on a spike at the finish line. When all runners are in, the names are then written out on the results sheet. In this system, the number of a runner is also on the wrist tag. It is read out when put on the spike and typed into on of the files. At the end of the race, the order of numbers stored in the spreadsheet is compared with those on the spike and when correct, the file is saved and the computer does the rest!

The special features of the system are:

Calls up the athletes name and school or house group when the athletes number is typed in the appropriate cell.
Scores points to each School or House Group equal to the placing of the runner.
If a minimum number of runners say 5 is needed to form a team, the first five runners home for a School or House Group count in the scoring, the five lowest point scores are tallied for each School/House Group in each age group.
The total number of points is tallied and the School/House Groups are listed in ascending order of points scored - less is best here! If there is a tie, the listing 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 etc is automatically adjusted to say 1, 2, 3, 3, 5.
Where a minimum number of runners in a team, the system takes into account Schools with less than the minimum number and places them behind schools with complete teams - that was the tricky bit! No manual override is needed at any stage of the process.
A Macro transfers the points for each age group to the table which tallies the points for the season.
The same macro sorts the top twenty finishers in each age group and transfers them to a table that stores the information from each meeting. This macro does in about 5 seconds what takes over half an hour to do manually on the computer back at school.
No waiting around at the end of the last race of the season while its results are compiled with those from previous meets to determine the premier school and the age group champions. The macro sorts the data of the top twenty finishers in each age group and lists the runners in order of performance over the whole season. This takes 5 seconds!
The pages are formatted for printing back at school or at the venue if a printer is available.
Results of a meet can be emailed to each competing school the next day or even saved onto a floppy disk on the day.

To sum up, all the computer operator has to do is type in the athletes numbers in order at the finish line, click on one button and the computer does the rest in 5 seconds!

Cross Country events vary in the age groups and the number of runners that score points for a team. The files can be modified to suit individual needs by negotiation. Contact us by email if you are interested purchasing the system and have it modified to suit your needs.

Sections of the files are shown below.

The red "13 ERROR" message tells the operator that a number has been entered twice - in this case Gomez Addams in 13th and 23rd place. The red crosses identify runners who are out of their normal age group - in this case Year 10 students and below who are running against Year 11 and 12 students.

Notice that in the case of a tie, the computer has placed the E next to the tied placings and has automatically split the points.