Website Ready for Winter Track

The Winter track season has started and the sectionviii.trackconference.com website has been updated. Rosters for Winter 08-09 were added earlier this week. Meet results for the Nassau Coaches meet have been posted.

Next, the home page Data Feed section that was added during the XC season will be updated to show Winter Track stats.

Data Feed options

We are getting further along with the Data Feed tab info and like where it is going. More types of info have been entered. Two new sections will show the average 5K time for each team's top 5 runners at Bethpage.

What other types of data would be good to place in that section?

We also plan to have an options settings to control what info appears on your home page when you are logged in.

Team Performance Grids

Team Performance Grids are now available on the home page. They are summaries of all individual performances for a team during the season . These grids are automatically generated by the system into spreadsheets that can be printed and saved. They can be printed at any point in the season and will be show all of the performances to-date.

To start, these grids are available for the current season. We are now working on speeding up the time it takes for them to appear, and then they will be available for other seasons.

Let us know what you think. Are they worthwhile? Any suggestions?

Favorites Tabs

We are also experimenting with new 'Favorites Tabs. Visitors who register in the system will be able to set individual athletes and teams as 'favorites'. Results and data items for these favorites will appear in the Tabs on the home page.

Data Feed Tabs

Data Feeds
New Data Feed Tabs are being tested on the site. They will allow you to see updated news items about recent noteworthy performances before you search through the meet results.

We are just starting to experiment with the types of news items being shown. We will use the feedback we get to add or eliminate different types of news.

We also plan to add an 'options' setting that will let you select the types of news to show such as 'recent significant results', 'rankings', 'recent meets entered into the system'.

Let us know what you think.

Admin Tool for Coaches to enter performances

A new admin tool is ready that will allow coaches to enter results from invitationals directly into the web system. This will let coaches keep the system up to date for all athletes - not just the elite athletes who are entered automatically by the league.

We are hoping that all coaches will participate or designate a responsible person on their team as a manager who can enter results.

The system is ready to start testing now and we are looking for an initial group of coaches who can start testing the system.

Getting ready for XC 2008

We are getting the site ready for the new year. Cross Country 2008 will be ready for the first meet of the year - the Wheately Invitational.

New additions to the site will start with an entry system that coaches can use to enter performances on their own. The league will try to enter any top 50 performances in invitationals, but are asking coaches to fill in the remainder of the results. Coaches will be able to log in with a username and password to enter the data.

Also, coaches will be able to enter team schedules into the system. This will be available online for athletes, parents and fans. Directions to events will be available online and linked to the schedule. With these schedules in place, the system will let us see which schools are at which events.

New Registration and Alert System

Alert System
Please signup for the new email alert service we are putting together for this website and section 8. The idea is to use this to send update notices regarding track meets (such as rainouts, delays, etc.) and occasional alerts with information about activity in the section and this site.

Like everything else on this site, this alert service is a work in progress and we will be fine tuning the services as we go along. As we add any new alert types we will give you the choice as to whether you wish to receive those types of announcements.

You can signup for the alert system on the section8.trackconference.com website.

Site Registration and customization
When you register for the alert service, you will also be registered on the website. At some point in the near future we will allow you set some basic preferences on the site that will customize the site. The customizations may include the ability to have the home page defaults show info about your favorite team or your favorite events. It may also allow you to select certain athletes (maybe yourself) to highlight. We'll post more on this as it gets implemented.

In the meantime, please signup.

Online rosters and numbers have been fixed

A question was submitted earlier about team rosters and numbers being shown on the site. There were some problems and now they are fixed. Here are the details of the rosters available:

1. The site has a link on the top Teams menu which shows "2008 Athlete Rosters" (It had been mislabeled 2007 and was just corrected. ) On that page you can select the team and see the roster and the numbers.
   
2. It will also let you view "Alumni" from previous years. Current students who are not on the team, but who had been on prior teams will also be in the alumni section so that you can link to their individual profiles.
   
3. The default is to show the roster list by class year, but there is a link to switch the view to "Show alphabetically". When in this alpha mode you can switch back to "Show by class" mode.
   
4. There are links on the upper left that can switch between seasons so you can see Winter or XC rosters. (This did not have Spring 08 before, but we just added it.) 5 On the upper right side you have links to the full, printable county lists that Bob provides.

More results are being sent and prcoessed

We are getting more feedback from coaches since the section8.trackconference.com site is now the official website. That is great news.

We now have the 3rd large batch of results in hand and expect to have those loaded into the system some time on Weds. 5/21 morning. These should will include many results that have met the met the league standards. Our plan is to get caught up with those results before we start to integrate the additional results that have been sent. In the meantime coaches should still send results so that they can eventually be part of the permanent record in the athlete profiles.

Spring '08 Data Loaded

Data for the Spring '08 is finally being loaded this week. Data is being made available thanks to Bob Beer. (Going forward we need help from each coach. We can't just rely on Bob's work, but that's another story.)

• The first set has 1,500 performances and was loaded on Weds. 5/14/08.
• The second set was loaded on Friday 5/16/08.
• I am expecting the 'final' catch-up set of data over the weekend and would have that loaded on Monday 5/19/08

All this is just in time for the Division meets on Tuesday 5/20/08.

Once all this data backlog is loaded, we will sort through the additional performances that coaches have sent in and get those loaded.

Update on performance data

It is taking a little bit longer than expected to get data flowing for the Spring '08 season, and emails have been coming in asking what is going on. I'm hopeful that we can get on track by the end of next week.

The first stream of data will come from the performances being collected by the league. This is a good amount of results data from athletes who have met the minimum standard published by the league. Once that is is place we will have it linked up to athlete profiles and make it accessible in the overall rankings and in school top performance lists.

We do want more data though. We are encouraging coaches to send us results of all athletes from all of the meets. We're hoping that some of you out there will step up to help coahces get the data to us.

Spring 2008 is up and running!

The new '08 Section VIII website is ready for the Spring Track season. It has been updated with '06 and '07 Spring Track & Field, and we will try to load data from other years as it becomes available. Please send your suggestions about any improvements.