Have you ever introduced yourself to the virtual meet tool? Here's a quick tour of how it works!
Note: This article, and all other articles in this series assume a couple of things. They assume that you have established a username (registered) on the system and that you are logged in. If you haven't done that yet, go ahead and do it now. In addition, many of the functionalities assume that you are a MileSplit Pro member. If you are not a Pro member already, you can become one here.
Virtual meets are one of the most powerful tools available to MileSplit users. A virtual meet is a way of looking at what would happen if you formed a meet of selected teams from the database and everyone in the meet performed equal to their best mark of the season (in a cross country virtual meet, you can also set it to run their average marks for the season rather than their best marks).
The most typical way to set up a virtual meet is to access it through the Rankings feature on the main menu bar across the top of every MileSplit page. Click on Rankings, then select Virtual Meets. The dashboard for virtual meets will appear:
You will want to select your gender, season, level, the year of the virtual meet, and whether you want to include or exclude this year's seniors.
Next comes the task of picking your teams. The easiest way to do this, if it happens to meet your needs, is to select a grouping from the League dropbox. In most MileSplit states, all classifications within the state, and sometimes the various regions (or districts) and leagues are also available as options from the dropbox. In Colorado, a few counties are even already populated in the dropbox.
If you select a league or other grouping from the League dropbox, the virtual meet starts calculating automatically, and in a few seconds you will have the results of your virtual meet. Once the meet has been produced, you have options to start over with the same or with different teams.
If you want to create a custom virtual meet, you will need to select each of your schools from the list of teams in the table below the dashboard. As you select teams for your meet, those school names appear to the right of the team list. When you have selected all the teams you want in your meet, click on the View Results button just below the list of selected teams. Again, in a few seconds, your virtual meet results will appear.
A track and field virtual meet is static once it has been created. A cross country virtual meet, on the other hand, has a few options you can use to further refine the results. We'll discuss those below.
The first thing you can do with a virtual cross country meet is remove athletes. If for some reason you want to see a virtual meet without a particular athlete (or athletes), all you need to do is hover your mouse over the name of the athlete. At the left end of the row for that athlete, a blue X will appear. Click on the X and that athlete is removed from the virtual meet and everything else is recalculated.
You might use this option, for example, if you know an athlete has moved away or is injured.
If you scroll down just a little on a virtual cross country meet, you'll find that you also have the option of changing the scoring for the meet. The default, of course, is set to five scoring runners with two more displacers. Both of these numbers, however, can be edited to produce a meet with a different number of scorers and a different number of displacers. Once you have selected those values, simply click on the Rescore button and your meet scoring is recalculated.
Each meet page also has a link for running a virtual meet for the teams listed in the meet. In practice, however, teams without online registration rarely have all the teams listed for the meet that will actually be participating in the meet, so use the link on a meet page with understanding of what you're going to see. Also note that the link for doing a virtual meet on a meet page goes away once the day of the meet arrives.
Another form of a virtual meet that is popular during cross country season is XC team scoring. Get there by clicking on Rankings, then double-clicking on XC Team Scores.
In this case, XC Team Scores automatically populates with the most recent boys team scoring available. The various dashboard options allow you to funnel the lists of teams and athletes scored in various different fashions. You can even do XC Team Scores on the 1600 and 3200 times from outdoor track season with a few dashboard selections.
It's worth a few minutes of exploration on XC Team Scores to see the various scorings you can produce.
There is no option to eliminate athletes under XC Team Scores.