Managing Championships
Discover more from OpenTrack News
Managing Championships
The latest major internationals and championships managed by the OpenTrack Platform
OpenTrack has been steadily developing this summer to improve key areas regarding championship competitions. Significant new features have been added including World Athletics’ latest championship seeding rules; automatic progression through heats, semis and finals; track relay declarations for both heats and finals; and more. Our users are now managing formal major championships and matches at international level. In July alone, we handled:
athletics at the NatWest Island Games in Guernsey
the Balkan Senior Championships
the Nordic U20 match (Sweden/Norway/Finland/Denmark+Iceland
Greece versus Cyprus
The weekend of 15-16 July, with Balkan and Nordic action going on simultaneously, was our busiest ever, with almost 600,000 pageviews from 32,000 people.
Island Games
The Island Games, whose 2023 was edition hosted in Guernsey, is the big event for many island communities — several of them already OpenTrack users. The event has all the formality and complexity of a multi-sport Commonwealth or Olympic Games. We worked closely with the organisers this spring to ensure full compliance with World Athletics’ seeding rules. This was also the first time we’ve had both heats and finals of track relays, with the quartets changing in between, and we now support this.
Mikey Ingrouille had these nice words for us:
“The ability to fetch PBs worked very well for athletes with data available and was a massive help with the seeding process.”
“The OpenTrack seeding function is incredibly intuitive, effective, and useful from heat to final. We had just 90 minutes scheduled between championship 100m semis and the final, but OpenTrack gave us the potential to rapidly seed the final and almost instantaneously publish startlists to competitors, officials, and the public. It was instrumental in delivering a seamless championship event.”
“Excellent support from the OpenTrack team, who were always on hand to help very quickly.”
Balkan Championships, Serbia, 21-22 July
These championships brought together 20 of the smaller countries in Europe, with almost 400 athletes competing. This year for the first time, we helped by creating “national team” organisations in our system, so each country can create a pool of their better athletes, and select their teams with a few clicks (and even edit them from their phones at trackside if necessary), as we do for league meetings in the UK.
“It was a great experience for us as organizers, it was so easy to manage the final entries and to get from the entries to the start list in less than 2 hours…
We also used a TV console to publish results on the stadium screen and to show the best three during the medal ceremony….
and for the first time, we used the #Share option for our Instagram and Facebook page. Our Federation PR and head of Media for the championships enjoyed using this option.” - Marko Ristov
Nordic Under 20 and Cyprus-Greece matches
These are formal international competitions. Cyprus-Greece has been done with Opentrack for several years, but it was our first Nordic international. We implemented the scoring system, and delivered live scores throughout the match, which was followed on the web by over 11,000 people online, with 150,000 page views. That’s a lot of serious athletics lovers, all able to follow the action in real time!
Championship competitions and top level athletics can be smoothly handled by OpenTrack, saving time for the organisers and delivering more to spectators and athletes! Of course, all of this is available for club and school events too. Get in touch if we can help with your athletics meeting!