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Club competitions
A competition is your club's own scored contest over a season of races. Your club decides what to call it — a championship, a grand prix, a points table, a set of distances everybody has a go at — and we score it. You say which races count, what one race is worth and how many of them add up to a total; the table is worked out from the results the club already holds, and kept up to date as more come in. This page is for the committee member who sets one up and runs it through a season.
Who can do this?
Defining a competition, changing its rules, opening it and closing it: Club Admin or Events Manager, in the admin panel. Reading the table in the volunteer console, drafts included: Records Manager and Captain as well. Working the Reconcile list: anyone who reviews results, so Results Reviewer too. Members read their own table in the member app, and anyone at all can read it on your club's website if you publish it there.
What a competition is here
Four things make one up: a set of races, a way of scoring one race, how many of them count, and who each runner is up against. Everything else follows from those. The rules are broken into seven choices, and each one is a section of the same form.
| Choice | What it decides |
|---|---|
| Who is in | Which members are scored at all — normally everyone with a current membership |
| Which races count | Where the season's results come from: a competition group's fixtures, or a named set of distances |
| What one race is worth | How one result becomes a score — a place among the club's runners, points for finishing, an age grade |
| How the races add up | How a season of scores becomes a total: all of them, the best few, or an average |
| How the table is ordered | How totals become places, and what happens when two are equal |
| Exclusions | Runners kept out of the awards, or out of the table altogether |
| Bonuses | Extra points, and the rolls a club reads out at the end of the season |
Who competes against whom is the Category bands: the tables the competition is scored into. Leave them empty and you get one table per gender, in your club's own words. Add bands and you get a table for each, with a From age and a To age. A band decides what somebody is scored in for a whole season, so the competition also names the Age fixed on date — The 31 August cut-off, 1 January, The first fixture or Race day. Clubs genuinely differ here, so the preset answers it and you change it if yours does it differently.
Setting one up from a preset
Competitions live in the admin panel under Events → Competitions. Every preset is a real running club's own competition, so start from the nearest one and change the numbers rather than assembling rules from nothing.
- Open Events → Competitions and choose New competition.
- Pick a Preset. There are five, and each one names what it does: Grand Prix — club position, Grand Prix — age-adjusted, Distance set — best three averaged, Best N — category positions, and Grand Prix — finishing plus a bonus. Choosing one fills in the name, the description, the age date and the bands, and How it scores shows you its rules in words before you commit to anything.
- Give it the Name your club uses for it and the club's Season — the word printed above the table — then choose the Competition group whose fixtures it is scored over. A distance-set competition has no group: name its Distances instead, and any accurately measured race at that distance inside the window counts.
- Set Visibility to Members only or Anyone. This is who may read the table once the competition is open, and you can change it later.
- Edit the Category bands if the preset's are not yours, then save. You land straight on the rules, which is where the arguing happens: every number a preset ships — the points table, how many count, the minimum to be ranked — is editable there.
- Use Preview standings at any point. It scores the season from the results the club holds today and saves nothing, so you can try a rule out before anybody sees it.
Opening puts the table in front of the club
Open makes the standings visible to everyone the competition is shared with, and they are worked out again whenever a result changes. They stay marked Provisional until you close the competition.
When the table looks right, choose Open.
A competition you have not opened is a Draft, scored for nobody but the people who can edit it. Nothing is published by filling in the form.
Where the results come from
A competition never holds results of its own. It reads the ones the club already has, so everything in Results and club records about how a result arrives applies here unchanged — and nothing counts towards a table until it has been through review.
The table looks after itself. We work it out again whenever a result is published, recorded, imported or re-graded, whenever a submission is amended, whenever a result is moved from one member to another, and whenever two member records are merged. That takes a few seconds rather than being instant, so a table read straight after a big import may still be catching up. If you need it now, Recompute now in the volunteer console asks for it.
Publishing the table on your club's website
To publish a table, set the competition's Visibility to Anyone, then add a Competition Standings section to a page on your club's website. A members-only or draft competition renders nothing at all there, which is the safe way round.
The section takes the Competition, an optional Heading and Subheading, Rows per category (10 by default), and two toggles: Show age grade, and Invite members to sign in for their own breakdown, which adds a line under the table. A public table never carries the per-race breakdown — only a signed-in member sees their own. Where a competition runs year after year, visitors get a season switcher.
Closing the season
Closing changes what members see
Closing works the standings out one final time and marks them final: they stop saying Provisional and stop changing when a result is edited. If a correction arrives afterwards you can Reopen the competition, but the table starts moving again, and anybody who has seen the closed standings will see different numbers.
When the last fixture is in, open the competition in the admin panel and choose Close.
Beta — ask us to switch this on for your club. Awards — the medals, the most-improved, the roll of everybody who ran every fixture, minted at the close with the figures behind each — are not switched on for every club yet. A handicap series, where each runner starts off their own mark, is coming; there is nothing to set up for one yet.
From the console
Performance → Competitions in the volunteer console is where a competition is worked rather than configured. Standings is the table, with each runner's own breakdown a tap away. Reconcile is the list that earns the tab: every result at a fixture that scored nothing, with the Runner, the Fixture and Why it didn't count. Most of them are a member record with a gap in it, and filling the gap puts the runner in the table next time it is worked out.
What members see
A member in a table sees their own row first: Your place in their band, their Total, how many of their races counted, and a strip of squares for the season's fixtures — Counted, Ran, did not count, Did not run, Results to come and To come. How your total was made opens the working, race by race. Under that is the club's whole table, which they can switch between bands.
A member in an open table also gets a Your season line on their home screen — where they stand and how many races are left to change it — which taps through to the same page. While the season runs, the page says the table is still changing as results come in; once you close it, it says the season is closed and the table is final. The help library answers the member's side of this in How does my place in a club competition work?
Troubleshooting
A member ran but has no points
Open Performance → Competitions → Reconcile in the console and find them. The reason is on the row. No date of birth on file and No gender recorded are gaps on the member's record — fill them in and the runner is placed next time the table is worked out. No category covers this age means your bands have a hole in them: check the From age and To age either side of the runner. Not eligible for this competition is a membership status the rules exclude. And Not enough races to be ranked is not a fault — they are in the table and will be ranked once they have run the minimum the rules ask for.
A race that scored nothing for anybody usually has nothing the scorer can use: No time recorded where the results are positions only, or No finishing position recorded where they are times only. Adding what is missing to the result is the fix.
The table is marked provisional
That is the normal state of a season in progress. Provisional means the competition is open and the table still moves as results are reviewed, corrected and imported. It is not a warning that anything is wrong, and it goes away when you close the competition.
Our rules do not fit a preset
A preset is a starting point, not a mould. Every number in it can be changed once the competition exists, and each of the seven choices above can be swapped for a different rule — so the shape you want is usually a preset with its points table, its counting rule or its bands edited. Use Preview standings to check the change before anyone sees it. If you have tried and your club's rules still will not fit, tell us what they are; we would rather add the rule than have you keep the table in a spreadsheet.