Using Athletic.net For DVCL Results

This is for parish coordinators and their helpers who want to know how to post their team's results on athletic.net.


There are two cases:

1. Someone else posts the results

2. You Post the results


After each DVCL Meet, Gil sends the coordinators the results in a spreadsheet that contains all the results for each of the meets.  Usually, there are three meets per weekend.  And usually, there are three sheets in the spreadsheet file per meet.


If you're at a meet with CTK, I will take care of posting the results to athletic.net when they are available, so you're case #1.  If you're at a meet with St. Mary, David Burnash can usually be counted on to post results.  Otherwise, talk amongst yourselves and decide who needs to post each meet's results.


Case #1 is simpler, so we'll start there.  If you fall into Case #2, start with the steps below which everyone must do.


For Case #1, there are really just three steps:


1. Introduce your team to athletic.net
2. Upload your roster (and keep it updated)
3. Enter your schedule (and adjust it)


Case #2 adds one more step:
4. Upload meet results


Introduce Your Team
If your team has not used athletic.net before, you may need to introduce the team to the site first.  When I was getting started, they created a whole hierarchy for CYO Track.  Here's the hierarchy for CTK:

• Youth Clubs
• CYO
• Oakland CYO
• Diablo Valley
• Christ the King

You don't really need to know any of this, but you do need to know that athletic.net considers our teams "youth clubs."  If your team includes more than one parish, you need to make a decision whether to list them separately or as one big team.  If you want to post relay results that are mixed between your teams (as CTK does), then make it one big team.


Follow the instructions and sign up as a coach for your team.  It leads you right through the process.  I believe that if someone has already done that, then you'll need to get their permission.  (I can't test this unfortunately.)


The next two steps are to upload your roster and to enter your schedule.


Upload Your Roster
To upload the roster, again, just follow the instructions.  Basically, you need to make a spreadsheet similar to the one we all send to Gil at the start of the season.  You'll just need each runner's name (first and last in separate fields), their gender (M or F), and their grade.  After you upload it, you can edit it later to add new team members or fix spelling errors.


Enter Your Schedule
There are simple instructions for entering your schedule.  The site keeps a list of meets for each date.


Entering the schedule is a little tedious, unless someone has been there before you.  If athletic.net already knows about your meet, then you can just select it from those on the 
calendar and you're done.  Otherwise, you just need to name the meet, list it's location, and city.


A couple of years ago when we started using athletic.net, we decided that our meets would have names like this:


CYO-DVCL Meet #2 - YVHS

or

Mary Chatterton Relays - YVHS

If you enter meets, please follow that form.  Otherwise, just select them if they are already on the schedule.  (Since we all go to the same Sectional Championships or Diocesan Championships meet, you ought to be able to select it since I've already entered them.)


Upload Meet Results


First, you'll need a program that I wrote that you can download from our web site:


Navigate to this location in a browser:
http://www.ctktrack.org/convert_to_hytek/


Download this program: convert_to_hytek.exe


Put it somewhere you can find it again.  You'll be running it from the command line (i.e., from a DOS or CMD window).  


Next, open the results spreadsheet and save the three sheets in "CSV" format.  For instance, if you are working with Meet #2, you might save the sheets in three files called 

meet2_track.csv
meet2_field.csv
meet2_relays.csv

Open a CMD window (Run -> cmd) and then change directories to where the convert_to_hytek.exe and three CSV files are using the "cd" command.

Then, type this (or cut and paste it):

 convert_to_hytek < meet2_track.csv > meet2_track.txt

You should either get some error messages or else (we hope!) something like
356 records converted.

If you get error messages instead, you might be able to figure out what's wrong
from there. Most are just warnings which you can ignore if they are about
misinterpreted garbage lines from the CSV file. But you might get some that
will indicate things to correct in the CSV file before rerunning convert_to_hytek.

Note that Excel can edit a CSV file.   In other words, if there are problems, fix the line(s) with the problem(s) and then re-save it and try again.

If you still have problems, please send me the error message or whatever response you get from running convert_to_hytek. If you think you're doing everything right but it's still not working, you can send me your CSV files and I'll try to convert them myself.

One thing that might happen is that convert_to_hytek.exe might not run on your PC if you are way behind on patches or have an old OS. Dave's running Vista and didn't have problems. I'm using XP Pro. You could try running "depends.exe" on the convert_to_hytek.exe program if that means anything to you.

After you make your three "txt" files, you are finally ready to upload the results to athletic.net.  Select the meet on the site, and choose "Upload Results."

It is a bit tedious, but works fine in my experience.  Here are some things that you need to do along the way.  The process is done by following the tabs on the Upload page left to right.  You can go back and forth and even upload the results more than once if you totally mess up.

• "Meet Divisions" are school grades for us.  For each meet, you'll need to "Edit Meet Divisions" and make 2nd through 8th grade divisions.
• Teams - You may need to match up team abbreviations.  It will make some wild guesses but get most of them right.  Sometimes "St. Michael" might end up as "SM" in the results, for instance, and you can associate "SM" with St. Michael if St. Mary was not at your meet.
• The "Athletes" tab is where you can connect "M. White" from the results to "Mary White" from your roster if necessary.   Select your team and see how many of the results you can clean up. 
• Under "Events," there is not usually much to do.  Mainly you'll need to make sure the shot put size is correct.  (We use 6 lb shots for the girls, and the 5th and 6th grade boys.  We use 8 lb shots for the older boys.)
• Under "Timing Mode," you'll just pick "Hand" unless your meet was at Granada where most events will be "FAT" (for fully automated timing).   But even at Granada, you may have hand-timed the 1600m and will certainly have hand-timed any short sprints run on the opposite side of the track.
• Finally, you'll reach "Publish."  Just do it.

Note that you can edit results later when you discover errors.  

Good luck!