RaceTab is a fully-featured meet management program. It makes a breeze out of scoring and publishing the results of your cross country meet.
There are a lot of ways to manage the timing and scoring of your cross country meet this fall. Some are easy, and some are labor intensive. Some are fast, and some are slow. Some are free, and some cost an arm and a leg.
Until recently, the tradeoffs used to be between fast/easy and expensive. With RaceTab, however, fast and easy is free. I've scored cross country meets on four different software packages. By far, the simplest to learn and use of those four is the only free one, RaceTab.
In this and the series of articles that follows, I'll introduce you to becoming a master of cross country meet management using RaceTab software. As we go along, please feel welcome to pose any questions you have in the comments section for this article.
You'll get your first RaceTab instruction at the end of this article, but let's first attempt to bring a few skeptics into the camp. Maybe you've been scoring your meet by hand for years. It doesn't cost you anything but a little time and it works, so why change?
The first reason to change is that meet management software is much faster than hand scoring. Maybe you feel like you have the time to score by hand, but the faster you can produce results, the less time people spend waiting around at the end of your meet. Less time waiting around means more happy people. Happy people spread the word and keep coming back.
The second reason to change is that meet management software is more accurate. If you've properly set the scoring parameters of your meet, it doesn't make any mistakes in the calculation of the team scores. Have you ever been at a meet where a mistake was made in scoring and changes had to be made? That's never a pleasant scenario. It's uncomfortable for both the winners and the losers.
The third reason to change is that meet management software produces more information. Would you like to see your team's pack time? It's in the printout. Would you like to see your team's total time? It's in the printout.
The most important reason to use meet management software, however, is to validate the performances of the young men and women who drop sweat on the trail five or six days a week in the name of your program. Without meet management software, results are rarely reported beyond the top 10 or 20 finishers. Most races have a lot more competitors than that who are crying out (even if silently so) the receive a kind of recognition similar what the top finishers receive. Meet management software makes it possible for every finisher to be reported in the results and for those results to be published in local and regional media. That makes a difference to athletes and parents alike, a big difference.
I hope that gives you enough motivation to give it a try.
If it has given you that motivation, your first Race Tab lesson is coming. We're going to download your own copy of RaceTab. And, don't worry, there are no upgrades or annual licenses to purchase. You get the full package with your download. But, you do have to have a Windows system. My apologies to the Mac users in our midst, but RaceTab is not available for a Mac operating system unless you have a Virtual Windows operating system installed on your machine.
So, here is what you do:
1. Point your browser to the RaceTab site (http://racetab.milesplit.com/).
2. You don't have to sign up to download the software, although you do have to sign up to participate in the forums. If all you want to do is download the software, click on Download from the menu bar across the top of the page.
3. Select the Latest Stable Release and let the program install on your system. As the installation completes, it's best if you install a RaceTab icon on your desktop so the program is easier to find when you want it.
4. At this point, you can either wait for the next installment of this series, or you can start playing. If you're like me, you'll start playing a little; you learn better that way, anyway. You can also explore the user guide for further direction (the User Guide is one of the options on the navigation bar of the home page of the RaceTab site).
Next up: Basic cross country meet setup.