Reflections on MileSplit New Mexico's First Season

The seniors of Silver High School's state championship team celebrate their state championship on Saturday night. Photo by Cindy Lee.

It's been a rewarding first season of doing the MileSplit site for New Mexico. Throughout the season, I've tried to keep myself in the background and New Mexico high school track and field in the forefront. It's now time to tell a little bit of the story from the other side of the web site.

After a year or two of wrestling with the idea, hoping all the while that I could encourage someone from New Mexico to take it on, I finally decided to give the site some life by taking it on myself in late January of this year. I've run the Colorado web site for better than four years now and most of that time I've wished the New Mexico site was active. It came down to the realization that I would have to be the person to make it happen if it was going to ever become active. I certainly did not feel that I was "the expert" on track and field in New Mexico, but none of the people I'd hoped to encourage seemed to want to take the bait. It is a daunting task, at least initially and if anyone felt they might have the time to do it, they weren't letting on that they did.

Since January, however, I've learned a great deal about high school track and field in New Mexico. I still may not be the expert, but I'm creeping up on those who are experts.

The first year of a MileSplit site is filled with ups and downs. Ups mostly include people excited to see something like this happening in their own neck of the woods. One or two appreciative e-mails a week keep the motor running nicely. Downs mostly include the constant struggle to get results sent to the site. Results are the foundation of what we do at MileSplit. We build on that foundation, of course, but, in the end, published results drive most of what you see on the site.

You've seen a lot of photos from Silver High School on the site this spring. No program wrapped its arms around this site more enthusiastically than Silver. I did a little celebration of my own when Silver's boys won the 3A state title. Their enthusiasm was evident to me all season long and their help was priceless. They earned the recognition of the cover photo on this article.

Help and encouragement came from other corners as well, and I'd like to take this moment to thank all those who took an interest in the site and took the time to send me a note or two or even send me some results to work with. A huge note of thanks goes out to Blake Wood (photographer extraordinaire) and Teo Cutter (a young, energetic track/cross country guy with first-class writing credentials). Without their help, this first season of MileSplit New Mexico would have floundered badly.

But, what you've seen is just the beginning.

I'll continue to maintain the site over the summer with fresh content. That content won't come on an every day basis, but it will come frequently enough that you'll want to keep checking in. We'll follow club track in the summer as best we can, and we'll spend some time looking at the cross country season ahead.

The plan is to have this site exceed all of your expectations with this fall's cross country season. I hope you're now convinced the site is around to stay and worth some little investments of your own energy--things like sending in results, registering as a user in the system, claiming team pages (for coaches only), claiming athlete pages (for athletes and parents), and participating on the forum. This site will become as active as you make it.

Cross country coaches, I'd like to encourage you to use RaceTab for scoring your cross country meets in the fall. It's way easier than hand scoring meets, and every athlete gets a published result. If you need a tutorial, I'm happy to talk to you about that. If enough of you would like to give it a try, I'll come down to New Mexico and help bring you up to speed on using RaceTab technology to make your meet management duties go much faster and easier.

Maybe the best part of RaceTab is that it's free. There's no need to pay a hefty price for meet management software. So, if that's been an obstacle for you, consider it an obstacle no longer. I'd also like to encourage you to use MileSplit online registration for your meets. There are a lot of things we can do for your meet with online registration and the only thing we charge for is the per-athlete fee of online registration. You can be assured the rates are competitive.

If you're worried about learning a new system, it's easy with only a tiny bit of practice. Several New Mexico coaches did online registration for meets in Colorado already this spring.  If you're worried about entering your roster from scratch (and the time that takes), your rosters are already nearly complete on your team page! All you need to do is become a team admin and add in your incoming freshmen and other new athletes in the fall.

Keep in touch, we're in this together!