Seeding¶
Seeding is one of the most laborious things that an official or race director has to do. Data collection alone can take a lot of time, and then sorting athletes into heats can be a manual and time consuming task.
For open meetings, it can be difficult to fully prepare in advance, making fast seeding a necessity. OpenTrack's system means this process takes only seconds and is fully automated. For tricky races that require manual tweaking, this is still possible! If you have multiple rounds, check out our round progression guide.
Automated Seeding - Track Events¶
Navigating to the Seeding Page¶
Navigate to the Event List, and choose the event you want to seed.
Seeding on Performances¶
You may be taken straight to the Seeding page. If you want to review or add the data you will seed on, click on the Competitors Tab.
Depending on how you have collected your competitor data, you may have varying amounts of data here.
If an athlete is lacking data, you can add it to the relevant box. Leaving all cells blank for an athlete means they will be seeded as if slowest.
- During the entry journey, SBs, PBs, and QPs can be collected (within past 2 seasons).
- If bulk loading competitor data, you can copy in PBs & SBs.
- By clicking on the athlete from the Manage Competitors screen, you can also add in a Target Time.
The order in which the four data types are used for seeding for are:
1 - Qualifying Performance, 2 - Season's Best, 3 - Target Time, 4 - Personal Best
If you want to seed on a specific factor then you need to remove those before it in order.
When done, click Save and then navigate back to Heats/Round 1 Tab.
Seeding the Athletes¶
The seeding screen displays the seeding configuration at the top, and all your athletes' data below.
Configurable Options:
Methods - The options here are hard coded as per World Athletics rules:
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Open Meet Seeding:
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Order
- Best Last - Athletes will be seeded with the fastest athletes put in the final heat and slowest in the first. Within each heat the athletes will be seeded in an arrowhead formation with the fastest in the middle lanes.
- Best First - Athletes will be seeded with the fastest athletes put in the first heat, with athletes getting slower as the heats go. Within each heat the athletes will be seeded in an arrowhead formation with the fastest in the middle lanes.
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Lanes - Input the maximum number of athletes/lanes per each heat.
- Round Structure - This will be pulled from the Events grid (Round column). Update the number if you have too many/few athletes for the heats specified.
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Championship Heats Seeding:
- Lanes - Input the maximum number of athletes/lanes per each heat.
- Round Structure - This will be pulled from the Events grid (Round column). Update the number if you have too many/few athletes for the heats specified. You can also choose how many subsequent rounds there will be.
- Qualifiers on position (Q) - Decide how many athletes from each heat will automaticaly progress to the next round.
- Qualifiers on performance (q) - Decide how many fastest lossers will progress to the next round.
SEEDING
- SEED HEATS - Clicking the green seed heats button which generate the round 1 start lists, using your predetermined settings.
- PUBLISH - Clicking the red publish button will publish your seed lists, making them availble for everyone to view.
Here you can see, each heat with each athlete assigned a lane.
Overriding Seeding¶
If you want to tweak anything or make slight changes then this is possible by clicking on the specific athlete,
From here you can use the single arrows to move athletes up and down lanes (from your specified lanes as per the previous page) and the double arrows to move them between heats.
This can be saved per heat or all in one go when you are done but make sure you do press Save!
Automated Seeding - Field Events¶
If, in your field event, you have more than one pool, then automated seeding works pretty much the same as it does for track events.
Navigating to the Seeding Page¶
When on the event, accessed from the homepage, click NEW SEEDING SCREENS.
This will take you to the seeding screens.
From here, as with track seeding, you can access the Competitor Tab, if you need to add or update any of the data. Once that is done then you can configure the seeding as appropriate.
Seeding Options¶
- Championship Heats
- Following World Athletics rules - the pool order is random.
- Qualifiers on position (Q) - this sets the number of automatic qualifers from each pool to progress to the next round.
- Qualifers on performace (q) - this sets the number of best lossers who will progress to the next round.
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Open Meeting Seeding
- Pool Order - you can select how you want the pool to be ordered.
- Max per pool - this sets the maxium athletes in each pool.
- Round Structure - this sets the number of rounds and the number of pools in each round.
Click the SAVE button.
- SEED HEATS - Clicking the green seed heats button which generate the round 1 start lists, using your predetermined settings.
- PUBLISH - Clicking the red publish button will publish your seed lists, making them availble for everyone to view.
If you only have one pool for your field event then it is really simple. As per World Athletics rules field events have a random draw.
Go to the event from the competition homepage. A list of all athletes entered into the event will be shown, along with their SB, PB and QP if applicable.
Simply click the FETCH START LISTS button.
This will give you the randomly generated start list. The image below is of the race director view.
To go to the public view, click DETAILS.
(The public do not see the editable buttons on the right hand side).
Any athletes who are entered but not yet seeded (for example they entered after the seeding took place) will be displayed above the start list(s) so they can be easily identified.
Manual Seeding - Track & Field Events¶
Our automated seeding screens are great at quickly seeding all your races, but you can still utilse manual seeding to make quick edits after using the automated seeding or for league matches which have pre-determined start list.
If you have a specific start order for track or field, then it is possible to manually create this.
Clicking on the event page, accessed from the competition homepage, all athletes entered into the event will be shown, along with their SB, PB and QP if applicable. Click the tool icon, as seen below, and choose EDIT BY LANE for track events . . .
. . . and Edit by Place for field events.
Both will take you to a grid style input screen, which is the same as when you are manually inputting results.
For Track, simply input the lane and the bib number of the athlete. The system will match the bib number to the athlete:
Clicking SHOW ATHLETE DETAILS will give you the further data on the athletes.
When done, click SAVE.
For field events, it works much the same but you input the bib number and order:
Similarly, click SAVE when done.
You now have a start list:
