Wave Starts in Cross Country

[Roger Bradshaw]

One of the most common questions lately is how do you manage races in XC meets where participants will start in waves.  With start line "social distancing" as the biggest hurdle in managing XC this fall, many are finding ways of starting smaller groups of participants.  There's a lot of ideas on how to group individuals - one is sending off participants team by team.  The example below is how you'd accomplish that.  If your meet has different ways of grouping, the approach will be the same as what's shown here.

There's a pretty straight-forward approach to this.  Most likely, you will still organize your meet as a single Race Director race.  If the meet has multiple races, you'll most likely manage this with a separate division for each race.  When you set up the race, the Finish Line tab will look like this so that you can also manage waves of participants within each race.  

The "Treat Each Division as a Separate Race" setting must be carefully thought through.  If you expect that it's unlikely that there will be a gap between the last finisher in one race and the first finisher of the next race, you should not use this setting.  Instead, leave this setting off and score the race with a single gun time - setting the participant wave times relative to when the very first wave goes off.

When you manage waves by participant in this scenario, the participant level "Wave Group" becomes very important.  Let's say the plan is to start each team as a wave.  This makes setup simple - you establish the wave group code to be the same as the team number.  The wave group code can be managed on this screen and it can also be one of the columns in your participant data spreadsheet.

To set wave times, use the "Wave" button in the task bar.  The wave offset time will be entered based on how much time elapses from the gun time for the race the participant is entered in.

[Raul Najera]

Thank you for the clarification.

How will this effect using Finish Line by Division for spearate classes using new gun times for each Division.

If there are two waves per race, we'll only need 1 wave offset for the whole meet correct? 

The wave number (2) will be applied to each separate gun time, right?

[Roger Bradshaw]

Yes, you are correct - as long as wave 2 starts at exactly the same offset in each race.  I clarified when you should be using the Separate Finish Line setting in the original post. 

[bnh...@comcast.net]

I know that this would be a bit laborious, especially when you are (hopefully very slowly) working to move everything to RDS. But... having the ability to, within RD, trigger each "gun time" for each wave rather than using a stopwatch or connecting a trigger signal in the timing equipment would be handy.

I have used the stopwatch method and each time, I am worried that I didn't start the stopwatch when I was also hitting the "trigger start time" in RD.

A thought: Within the trigger the start time button (on the import results screen), if the race is set up to have waves, at each time the start button is triggered, also specify which wave group it applies to.

RDS has something somewhat akin to this with being able to trigger the start time for each race so there isn't just a single "gun time".

[Pat Melgares]

And as a follow-up, let's say I set up waves as follows:

Wave 1: 00:00:00.0

Wave 2: 00:01:00.0

Wave 3: 00:02:00.0

Wave 4: 00:03:00.0

Wave 5: 00:04:00.0

Wave 6: 00:05:00.0

Now, the Boys and Girls Varsity races are starting 2:00 apart. I could assign the waves in those varsity races as Wave 1, Wave 3 and Wave 5, correct?

Then, the Boys and Girls JV races are starting 1:00 apart. I could assign the waves in the JV races as Wave 1, Wave 2, Wave 3, Wave 4, Wave 5 and Wave 6, correct?

Thank you,

Pat Melgares

Manhattan, Kan.

[Roger Bradshaw]

This improvement has just been made in Race Director for triggering wave times.

[Roger Bradshaw]

Yes, Pat's assumption is correct.

[Ed Schrank]

Awesome addition. My question: for the first wave if I set time for wave 1, gun time doesn't change. Do I just ignore gun time since each wave gets a start time? 

[Ed Schrank]

I used this feature for a race this evening. Another fantastic addition to RD. To answer my own question: I imported all entries from Milestat and added a column for the wave group. RD is looking for a number. I put in a blank for my first group, then a 1 for wave 1, 2 for wave 2 and so on. Imported to RD and assigned this info to the wave group. All good. Tested and everything worked perfectly. 

Race this evening with 89 runners in 4 waves. One coach asked me shift a runner from her wave to another (Wave 1 to Wave 0). I did this in update participants. When this runner crossed the line, the system gave her a bogus wave time. It stood out as we did all waves on 1 minute goes (her wave time was 1:15 and the only 1:15 wave time). Very odd. I sent the info to Roger. So an fyi if you do race day updates, there seems to be a bug here.

Otherwise, this was one easy race. All XC results were produced without problem. cool.