If you've been shivering through practices at higher elevations in northern New Mexico this week and last, it's hard to believe that the outdoor meets are starting this weekend, but it's true.
Spring starts a little earlier in Las Cruces, and I confess there's more than a small part of me that would very much love to be down in Las Cruces to be there when the season opens at the Field of Dreams at 3 PM on Friday afternoon. So far, registered teams include Las Cruces, Chaparral, Anthony, Santa Teresa, and El Paso Burges. But, at this point in the game, it's not so much who will be there as it is that the season is honestly and truly getting underway. A larger slate of meets is on tap for the first weekend in March. Track season is upon us.
Once again, tracks all around the state will hear the crack of the starter's pistol, the thunderous noise along the finish straight as competitors make their final bids for first, the clattering of hurdles not quite cleanly cleared, and the thudding of the discus coming back to earth. It's track season, baby!
And, that also means things are starting to get busier at MileSplit New Mexico.
This spring, as we did last spring, we'll be publishing results from every meet in the state that we can get our hands on. Hy-Tek or RaceTab flat html results are the easiest to work with. RaceTab is free meet management software. It works great with a hand-timed meet or a FAT-timed meet. Yes, there is an up-front learning curve to be mastered with meet management software, but once you are there, you will never go back to writing meet results by hand onto paper forms and faxing those forms to the schools that came to your meet. Parents of your team members will rise up and sing your praises because you have opened the door to making meet results, and not just the memories of the meet, accessible to all.
If meet management software is too much to master at this point, I've created a simple downloadable meet results Excel file. Simply fill in your meet results in the form (add more lines to an event if you want or need them), e-mail to me, and I'll format and post fully formatted and scored results on this site. It takes less time than filling out paper results forms and babysitting the fax machine as it sends out results to all the schools that attended your meet.
There is not now, nor will there ever be, a charge for posting or viewing meet results on MileSplit New Mexico.
Parents and other fans of track and field who are handy with cameras, quality photos are always welcome at MileSplit New Mexico. If you are a registered user of MileSplit New Mexico, you can upload entire albums of photos to the meet page from which you shot the photos. Simply log in, go to the meet page and click on the Add Your Photos link on the meet page. A Java-based photo uploader utility will take you through the rest (please resize your photos to about 600 pixels wide before uploading). If you want to send along just one or two full-sized photos for potential use as cover photos for articles, I'm happy to receive those as well. Send those as attachments to the e-mail address in the lower left corner of this, or any other, MileSplit New Mexico page. You can also post race video to the site for others' enjoyment.
Each week, we'll do a summary of the highlights from all of the meets from which we received results. Look for these week-in-review articles to appear about Tuesday of each week. Some meets along the way will warrant full-blown coverage devoted solely to that meet. Regardless, in whatever form or fashion possible, this site is devoted to coverage of all things high school track and field/cross country for the entire state of New Mexico. We hope you enjoy what you find here.
And please feel welcome to send questions my way! I'm happy to answer just about any and every question about the site that you can imagine.