Milesplit is garbage

No kidding. Way too many omissions in rankings and stuff

Yes. Yes it is. They should make a high school TFRRS. 🤔

People outside of the sport need to discover unique needs within the data. I think not just limited to shoe companies but also genealogists, archivists, marketing companies, etc.

Great in theory. Problem is DA won't pay state associations. That's what's happening right now. MileSplit and Athletic.net are paying state associations for the rights to their state meet registrations and performance lists, thinking they'll make it up on subscriptions.

Here in MD there is a new group that is filming races and going to post them for free on youtube. There is a sponsor (not sure who) that is paying them well to do it. Not looking for a financial return but want to bring back the free race coverage from a decade ago.

Good luck with that but if it lasts more than a season I would be shocked

Link? New Hampshire has been doing it for years for their Cross Country races. Sponsors, website, tons of video coverage, everything. just nobody cares because its New Hampshire. but they are thriving.

That's cool - not sure how they'd film some of the big races though. I can't see them driving a golf cart down and up the Dip at Bull Run, nor could I see them driving through the woods at Seahawk. I think the only big race they'd be able to do it at is the Maryland XC Invitational. I wish I could have seen myself run though - basically watching film, but for running.

Maybe they'd use a drone, but I wouldn't want to fly it in really narrow conditions. If it hits a tree and falls, it'll end up being trampled by the pack.

NH cross country coverage is one of my favorite parts of the fall—and I’m in the west coast. Coverage is great, beautiful surroundings, wicked awesome accents. super underrated YouTube channel.

agreed. they are awesome. I mean they go full video coverage for like little midweek dual meets between two tiny New England schools nobody has ever heard of. multiple cameras, multiple commentators! its hilarious and amazing and fantastic that they are so passionate about the sport. I hope those kids know how good they have it compared to states much larger than theirs. and yes the accents... "Im going with Kahn-kud! No way! Pinkatins on fiya!" 😂

My biggest complaint with MileSplit is their lack of respect for local history. Well accepted and historically significant state/national records are regularly missed in their lists because the performances pre-date MileSplit or are for field events (which they tend to treat with disdain). When corrections are ‘’suggested’’, they ask for documentation. Isn’t the documentation their purview!?

F*** them and their subscription fees!

People generally dont understand how milesplit came to be. Jason Byrne, a spanish major, allegedly taught himself computer programming in 2000. Except, by most people's standards, he never had any business programming in the first place. He was and still is a hack. Even called a booger by noteworthy New Jerseyians. Those oversights and missing concepts come to the surface in different ways.

Let's start with the calendar. The Jason Byrne assumption is to take teams and dates from last year's results and apply them to the present year. This doesnt work for many reasons. But I'll stick to the idea that producing a statewide calendar is something that needs to be done each year before the season starts. It takes time and it is not the same as the previous year, ever. Some states have a unified portal for scheduling (r_schoolToday). The scheduling creation on milesplit should come from those sources first.

It is obvious to me that shortcuts were taken either deliberately or through Jason Byrne's buffonery.

Shortcut #01, if a team name is ambiguous, for example Portland HS ME vs Portland HS OR, the Maine Portland results will show up in the Oregon page. Vice versa.

Shortcut #02, if a meet venue is in one state and the host is from another -- think Saint Mary's in Eastern Minnesota hosted by a Northern WI school -- the results show up in Minnesota even though no MN teams attended.

If we want to talk about and implement systems, let's go for precision, not something flubbed together. I view these shortcuts as either laziness or idiocy.

Let's move over to the "cc rankings" - ordered by 5k time ascending. This issue should be self explanatory but if not consider 5k courses vary in difficulty and terrain.

Let's talk about lacking unified lists: 1500, 1600, Mile and 3000, 3200 and 2-Mile. These lists dont exist but should because we have the coefficients that can supply a merge.

Let's talk about completion: surveying my state right now, Milesplit doesnt even have 30% of the meets from last week yet they charge a subscription to see results.

Let's talk about live results: no one including milesplit has figured out live results yet. The legacy hytek app with iframes is still the best implementation. The new Flotrack/Milesplit/PT Timing app is junk. Not implemented right.

Results processing:

Milesplit is a one-trick pony - pre parsed hytek files only.

Let's talk about who milesplit "employs" - privileged kids who majored in liberal arts and have zero job prospects. Typically skill-less college graduates living in their parents basement. More often than not, milesplit employees are not employable anywhere else. They emerge to attempt making names for themselves but then let their impulsive egos go to their head because theyve never had attention on themselves beforehand.

Let's talk about little things: I feel like a kindergartner designed milesplit's interface (header, tables, paragraphs) with crayola markers, the non-erasbale kind.

Finally, let's talk about history. Milesplit isnt even complete for years 2008 forward. From 2008 backwards, there's nothing but major major holes. We are at a point where we have 50 to 60 years of consistency. Distance running as more than an after school activity, rather year round. Coaches having some sort of competitive trainibg philosophy. Non-cinder, rubberized and grasstex tracks. Literature and quantification, etc. Milesplit doesnt have that data.

I love MileSplit. Maybe not perfect, but imagine how little we would have without it.

Here are all the benefits I've received in just the last week.

-Daughters 5k meet results uploaded within 12 hours.
-Videos interviewing her and teammates up within 4 hours.
-Prerace article written a couple days before.
-Postrace article written.
-Ability to research the track and xc histories of her competitors.
-Analyze who had graduated and even look at middle school results of new Freshman.
-Read some good articles about being a XC parent and also runner nutrition.
-Progression chart of daughters 12 months running XC really showing the trend of her improvement.
-shooting down fans of particular High Schools on LGR with actual data thinking their team will be top 3 at nationals. :D

MileSplit can be decent if, like you, you live in one of its small coverage bubbles. But, as the prior poster notes, it’s lacking in so many areas, and it’s lazy/relies on others to fill up those bubbles.

Living in the PNW with kids who are runners here, I’m glad I’m in athletic.net territory. Most meets have live results that are made official shortly after the meet, often with finish line photos or race videos embedded. Rankings are intuitive and I don’t feel like I am working with an AOL dial up interface like I do on MileSplit. I wish athletic.net would acquire MileSplit so we’d have unified coverage nationwide with a better interface, but I sense that MileSplit is the financially larger animal here.

Florida uses TFRRS for high school and it appears to work very well. Florida was also the first state to go metric for field events and TFRRS does a nice job of taking metric results and displaying them in both Imperial and metric:

In Colorado on the other hand CHSAA just keeps getting tighter with Milesplit, no consideration given to the fact that they are handing over years of data to a private company.

chsaanow.com

CHSAA announces partnership with MileSplit as its official registration platform for the cross country postseason

The Colorado High School Activities Association (CHSAA) announced a partnership with MileSplit, a part of the FloSports network, making MileSplit the registration platform for the cross country postseason.

Link:chsaanow.com/news/2021/10/21/chsaa-ann...

And Milesplit does an absolutely terrible job handling metric field event results.

I have notes.

I'd simply say people are getting limited value for their money, in most locations.

I am going to say one name that if youve been around you probably know: Alan Versaw.

Behind the original co.milesplit curtain, through no fault of his own other than his good will, was Mr. Alan Versaw. Without Mr. Versaw, Milesplit Colorado wouldnt be a thing.

Mr. Versaw's heart and dedication was pure. No doubt. But he made that error of devoting all those hours to Milesplit, for free, and continuing despite no return on his time investment. Realistically, he should have had his own website. And that's why the milesplit co data sits there anchored. It is a shame.

I've spoken to Alan a few times when he was the head coach at the Classical Academy, great guy. If you haven't seen it he was writing for Colorado Preps last spring covering Track and Field, I hope he keeps doing it in the future:

coloradopreps.com

Early assessment of the state track and field meet

A lot of track-oriented folks are spending an unexpected day at home (or, in some cases, in hotels) today. And

Link:coloradopreps.com/track-field/

Milesplit really started to suck after FloSports bought them. They completely stopped development on the site for years, it was painfully clear it was not a priority for FloSports at all. There have been aspects of Milesplit around hosting meets and uploading results that were broken for half a season and things like their virtual meet functionality, one of the few things actually worth paying their subscription fee for us coaches, was broken for an entire season one year. The website completely sucks on mobile devices. God forbid I need to make changes to meet entries at the last minute while I'm still at practice or check an athlete's state ranking while I'm at a meet. They let RaceTab, their nice but free meet management software, languish into irrelevance. Meanwhile DirectAthletics and MeetPro have just about cornered the market on affordable meet management software and live results posting.

College coaches were very smart when they created TFRRS. Us High School coaches should be screaming to standardize on a platform like that across the country. If Milesplit is what most state organizations like, then we should create a site like TFRRS based off Milesplit, in the same way TFRRS is based off DirectAthletics. That seems pretty silly when TFRRS already exists though. The bottom line is as things currently stand, FloSports owns years and years worth of data now for many states, and they can charge whatever they want for us all to use it, and if they do go out of business someday it could be lost forever. We should have never let that happen.