RaceTab: Basic Meet Setup

In this article, we'll take you through the steps of setting up RaceTab to score your cross country meet.

Now that you have RaceTab installed on your laptop, launch the program and we'll set up a cross country meet.

The first screen RaceTab presents you with (see cover of previous article) gives you the option of starting a blank meet, importing a meet, and reloading a recent meet. In this tutorial, we'll simply start a blank meet, although if you end up doing a lot of meet scoring you'll probably want to eventually learn how to import a meet template to speed things along.

For now, though, we simply want to open a blank cross country meet, so click on the red + Cross Country button to open a new cross country meet.

At the next screen, select the kind of meet you want to open. If you're reading this article to help you learn how to do it, you probably want to open a high school cross country meet, so click on the → High School button (you are welcome to explore the possibilities for other kinds of meets later on on your own). 

Once you've clicked to open a high school meet, you will see the screen that was captured to create the cover illustration of this article. There are several blanks to fill in. Fill in the name of your meet, the date(s), the location, and the city. The city location may be prepopulated for you based on the information given when you registered as a user of the software. If you need to enter a different city, simply highlight the existing city name and type in the city name you need in its place.

Next, select all of the divisions that you will have in your meet. If you need a division that is not shown, you will have an opportunity later to add a division. For now, though, click any and all of the divisions shown that you will need. When you open a new high school cross country meet, Varsity and Junior Varsity are preselected by default. You may deselect either or both, as needed, by clicking on the boxes. If you will have both Male and Female races, leave both of those boxes highlighted in green. Then click on the Finish button to take you to the next screen.

This screen has several tabs at the top, but we start at the Setup tab as shown in the screenshot below:

For most meets, there shouldn't be anything we need to do at this tab as the most important fields are prepopulated or set as defaults. You can add meet notes, if desired, in the Additional Info section, but some of these notes would be more logically entered on race day. If you wish to retain places of unattached runners for purposes of team scoring (this is non-conventional for cross country, but used in some places), check that box. If you need to change the number of scorers or displacers per team, those numbers can be adjusted, but they come up set to the usual cross country defaults of five and seven.

If you need another division not shown on the initial page of the meet setup, you can click on Divisions... and add one or more divisions. 

Before leaving this setup tutorial, we'll take a look at the Events tab. Go ahead and click on that tab now.

In New Mexico, RaceTab defaults to 5000 meter race distances. So, when you go to the Events tab, your meet should look like this:

If your races are 5K races, you don't need to change a thing. If, however, you're running 3-mile races, you will want to delete each of these events (click the red X above Event Name with each event highlighted), and then click the green + to add in 3-mile races. The Edit Event dialog box will appear each time you click on the + to guide you through the setup of each race that you add. 

With this done, you have now completed the basic setup of your meet. If you wish, you can do all of this weeks in advance of your meet. In the next article, we'll take a look at adding teams and athletes to your meet. This part can be done on meet day, if you enjoy living dangerously, or a day or two in advance of the meet.

Coming Up Next: Entering Teams and Athletes Into Your Meet