Why your athletes can't find their own results
Results that live in a PDF, a group chat or a whiteboard are invisible to parents, to recruiters, and to the athlete a year later.
Ask an athlete what they ran in the 200 last April. Most cannot tell you, and it is not because they do not care.
Where results usually go to die
- A PDF posted to a group chat, which scrolls away in a week.
- A whiteboard photographed on somebody's phone.
- A spreadsheet only the coach has.
- A meet-management program that prints beautifully and publishes nothing.
All four have the same failure: the result exists, but nobody can find it later, and nobody outside the team can find it at all.
Who is actually looking
Three people, and none of them are in the group chat.
A parent who missed the meet and wants to know how it went. An athlete comparing this season to last. And, for the ones who are good enough, somebody deciding whether to recruit them, who will search a name and find whatever the internet has.
If a time is not somewhere a stranger can find it, for that purpose it did not happen.— the whole reason results pages exist
What a findable result looks like
Every athlete on StatLap gets a page with their personal bests, their full competition history and their progression, at a stable web address, free, with no account needed to read it. The athlete can claim that page, and once a coach confirms it is really them, their results follow them across seasons, and across clubs if they ever move.
That last part is the bit a per-club database structurally cannot do. A club knows the half of somebody's career that happened at the club. The athlete owns all of it.
Public results are the default and they are free forever. An athlete or a parent can claim a profile at any time, and nothing about a coaching account is listed publicly.
Time your next meet with the phones you already have
Timing, the Film Room and the speed gates are free forever, with no account. A Club plan, $71 a month, puts your meets on your own results page, and one plan covers every phone.
Related
Why do parents keep texting you for times you already posted?
A coach who is the only place results live becomes the relay for every question about them, and that is a structural problem, not a parent one.
Read →Which events should a new athlete try?
Two measurements and a fortnight of letting everybody try everything will place most first-year athletes better than a season of guessing.
Read →Should athletes message you directly, or only in the team group chat?
A group chat is efficient for announcements and close to useless for the one question an individual athlete actually needs answered.
Read →Try it: Track and field timing app for meets: gun, finish camera, results