Seeding
Seeding is one of the most laborious things that an official or race directior has to do. The data collection alone can take a lot of time and then sorting athletes into heats is a very manual and time consuming task.
Open meetings are very common occurrences, often with entries on the day so it can be difficult to fully prepare in advance. This makes fast seeding a necessity. OpenTrack's system means this process takes only seconds and is fully automated. For those tricky races that require manual tweaking, this is still a possibility though!
Automated Seeding
Track Events
1. There are two methods of finding the Seeding page.
a. Direct from MANAGE | SEEDING and then choose the event you want b. From the competition homepage, choose Events and then click the event you want. If it has multiple heats you will see something similar to the screen below:
Click SEEDING & LANE DRAWS. This will take you to the seeding page for this event.
2. You may be taken straight to the Seeding page. If you first want to review your data, click PBS / SBS. From here you can review your athletes' performance data.
If an athlete is lacking data, you can add it on this page. Leaving all cells blank means they will be seeded as the slowest athletes.
Depending on how you have collected your Competitor data, you may have varying amounts of data here.
- During the entry journey, SB, PB and QP can be collected. For clarification this is Season's Best, Personal Best and Qualifying Performance (within past 2 seasons).
- If bulk loading competitor data, you can copy in PB & SB
- 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 the irrelevant ones before it in order.
When done, click SAVE and then SEEDING.
3. You should now be on the Seeding screen. This displays the seeding configuration at the top and all your athletes data below.
Configurable Options:
- Method - The options here are hard coded as per IAAF ruling:
- Choose from options:
- Fastest 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.
- Fastest 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.
- Championship - With this method there will be a spread of the talent (fastest athletes) between the heats with a random allocation of lanes within each heat.
- Choose from options:
- Heats - This will be pulled from the Events grid (Round column). Update the number if you have too many/few athletes for the heats specified.
- Max/Heat - Input the maximum number of athletes per each heat
- Max Lanes - Input the maximum lane number (not number of lanes) that you want to use
- Lane Preferences - This will just use standardised lanes unless specified. Click the ? for an explanation on how to edit the lanes used:
Once you have done editing, click the SAVE button and then the SEED button.
4. You will now see a screen with your seeded athletes.
Here you can see, on the right hand side, the lanes and heats that athletes are in.
5. If you want to tweak anything or make slight changes then this is possible via the OVERRIDE button.
From here you can use the buttons on the left to move athletes up and down lanes (from your specified lanes as per the previous page) and buttons on the right 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 Save!
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.
When on the event, accessed from the homepage, click SEEDING AND LANE DRAWS.
This will take you to the Seeding screens.
From here, as with track seeding, you can access the PBS / SBS page if you need to add or update any of the data. Once that is done then you can configure the seeding as appropriate.
- Fastest First and Fastest Last will refer to best (highest or furthest) first or last.
- Max / Heat is maximum in each pool
- Max Lanes and Lane Preferences are not relevant.
Click the SAVE button and then the SEED button when done.
If you only have one pool for your field event then it is really simple. As per IAAF rules field events have a random draw.
Go to the event from the comeptition homepage.
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).
Manual Seeding
Track & Field Events - they work the same way
If you have a really specific start list order, whether it is for a field event or a track event, then it is possible to manually create this.
From the event page, accessed from the competition homepage, 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:
