Meet Manager alternatives

[Mark Goepel]

Hi, sorry that this is slightly off topic, but it seems like the most relevant place.

Our club is looking for alternate meet management software to Hytek's Meet Manager.

What options are available and what do people recommend? The only two I have found far are:

• WinSwim http://www.winswim.com/
• TeamUnify - TouchPad http://www.teamunify.com/__corp__/touchpad/

 

Most of the surrounding clubs are using Meet/Team Manager so it needs to be able to 

• create meet events files that can be consumed by Team Manager
• load meet entry files created by Team Manager

Thanks

Cheers MG

[Mike Walsh]

The club I was associated with used WinSwim for a four years and switched to TeamUnify last season.  After 4+ years of volunteer work, I stepped down and the person who took over my role had prior experience with TU which was the primary reason for moving to it.  I can't speak with any in depth knowledge of TU, but I can speak to WinSwim.

I like WinSwim and their support was fantastic.  The UI is far more intuitive than Hy-tek (either TM or MM).  I don't know if the plan to implement Hy-tek compatibility was ever completed, I know they have access to the checksum algorithm as I sent them the PHP code I had developed to implement  it and spoke with Gary at WinSwim on the phone about it a couple times.  I believe they planned to add it in WinSwim 5, I never used anything later than WinSwim 4.2.x.

WinSwim's SDIF support is far better than Hy-tek's SDIF support.  WinSwim even supports the SDIF registration pyramid which Hy-tek doesn't support.  It also supports the lane and heat fields when importing an SDIF file which Hy-tek ignores.

Our team used a WordPress Swim Team plugin I wrote to manage most of our swim stuff.  We would export a Meet Entries file from WordPress which we'd import into WinSwim for seeding and relay team assembly.  From there we'd generate he sheets and run the meet.  WinSwim does have Dolphin Timing support but I don't believe it is quite as elegant as Meet Manager has but it worked pretty well for us.

Mike

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[Mark Goepel]

Thanks very much Mike,

Is anyone still maintaining the WordPress plugin?

I imagine now that you've stepped down as recorder it's probably not high on your priority list.

In your opinion, if we weren't going to use the WordPress plugin, what would be the best team management software to use with WinSwim?

Cheers MG

[Mike Walsh]

Mark -

I am still maintaining the WordPress plugin, I did some updates to it most recently at the end of October.  I really need to move it over to GitHub so it would be easier for people to contribute to it and it is on my to-do list at some point.  You can find the current version of the plugin here:  http://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-swimteam/

Regarding your WinSwim question - WinSwim's functionality encompasses in one application what Hy-tek does it two (Team Manager and Meet Manager).  You set up your swimmers and manage your meets all in one application.  There are different screens for each type of operation but it all sits within one application and all of the data is stored in a single database.

We stored our WinSwim database in a shared Dropbox folder which allowed 3-4 people to access it without having to zip it up and email around.  We did have to do some coordination so Dropbox stayed in sync but not having to worry who had the latest database was nice.  While I have never tried, I would assume you could do the same with Hy-tek.

Mike

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