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Create Competition

The first thing to do, whether organising a road race, XC event, track & field meeting, or anything else, is to create your competition.

If you have set up a similar competition on OpenTrack in the past, take a look at copying an existing competition instead.

New Competition Button

Starting from OpenTrack's homepage, click the NEW COMPETITION + button.

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OpenTrack homepage

You may be prompted to sign up or log in at this point.

Filling the Form

Complete the form on the next page.

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Competition Form

Field Descriptions

  • Name (English) - Enter the name of your competition
  • Date - Input the date it will be taking place. If it is a multi-day competition, input the first day. You can add the end date later.
  • Competition Type - Select the type, e.g. track, indoor, XC, etc
  • Organiser - Start typing the organisation (e.g. athletics club) that will be running the competition and select it from the resulting options.
  • Request new Organiser - If the organisation does not appear in the list above, input the requested organisation here
  • Location - Input the location of the competition, whether it is the track, stadium, HQ, start point, etc
  • Slug - Choose a slug. This is the part of the website URL that identifies your competition. It should be short and obviously related to your competition, e.g. Welsh Indoor Senior Championships could be "wasi". Do not include the year in your slug; it is already elsewhere in the URL.

Slugs

We try to give each thing in athletics a unique URL on the web, which is reasonably friendly and obvious. For competitions, the pattern is /x/<countrycode>/<year>/<slug>. the /x/prefix means "competition"

The term slug comes from the news industry, because news web sites often generate unique URLs from the title e.g /2016/uk/the-world-goes-crazy. We find everyone instinctively understands URLS like this:

/x/GBR/2019/muller-anniversary-games/
/x/ITA/2019/rieti-meeting/

Slugs should be as short as possible while still making sense. You can pick it, but please consider the patterns below.

They should NOT include the year, because we always have that in our URLs already.

A useful rule of thumb is that slugs should be simple, descriptive, and memorable!

Here are some ideas to encourage regularity...

National championships of various kinds

nc = Senior (or all-age) National Track and Field championships
nc-i = National Indoor Track and Field
nc-xc = National Cross Country Championships
nc-ce = National Combined Events Championships
nc-rw = National Race Walking Championships

nc-hm = National Half Marathon championships

For age groups below senior, you can suffix an age group:

nc-u16, nc-u23, ncxc-u20

Well known meetings happening once a year

Just abbreviate it to something everybody understands. This way, everyone can guess the URL to last year's, or next year's competition.

bislett-games
karlstad-gp

Think carefully about including a sponsor's name.

muller-anniversary-games

What happens if the Muller contract ends? Then we get a few years of this slug, and a different one the next year, for the same competition. So we discourage sponsor names unless it's a really long standing arrangement (like Estonia's chocolate manufacturer, Kalev, who have sponsored athletics for a long time!)

Regular meeting series

watopen01...watopen12    = the 12 Watford AC Open Meetings each year in the UK

Finishing Up

Click CREATE — if you haven't used OpenTrack before, your competition will be sent to us first, so we can best help you.

If you're a recognised competition organiser, you'll go straight through to filling in the basic information for your competition.