$48/year to use Milesplit?

Oh so you develop software? I don't know any of that stuff. What's your expert take on milesplit?

Brandon101 wrote:

Absolutely outrageous. I am very disappointed to see a great tool for athletes and coaches to view their stats throughout their running careers. Us college students have canned food and beer to spend our money on not $48 to see our competitors times.

1) What do you use from the site? Tell me and maybe we'll start a results site. How hard can it be? I say that but of course pay a lot for pro results each year.

2) Why don't you just use dyestat? That's free. Don't they pretty much have the same stats?

3) $48 seems like a lot but flotrack (which own milesplit charges $20 per month for videos so you are getting a bargain. One would think they would combine the two and include the results with a flopro subscription.

That's shocking that a business charges money for their services. That's an out-dated business model that can't be sustained in the modern world. Everything is free now or it should be free.

In Ohio (for example), MileSplit knows a school's League, Distirct, Regional, and Division (Size).

So I (as a paying customer) can click "Virtual Meet" and select my district, and I get the predicted results (based on PR or based on Avg Time, my choice) for my district meet.

I can also click "Virtual Meet" and choose the teams manually, if I know the teams that will be at my invite next week.

It helps me explain / demonstrate to my athletes who their competition is.

Dig deeper (by clicking on an athlete name) and you get a chronological race history for the runner at each distance.

I can admit, I DON'T subscribe for the articles.

rojo

1) What do you use from the site? Tell me and maybe we'll start a results site. How hard can it be? I say that but of course pay a lot for pro results each year.

We dont only link results. We do a lot of work to get results into our database and in one consistent format. Milesplit has been the dyestat on steroids for years.

They have the right to charge whatever they want and you guys have the right not to pay for it if you choose not to.

When they try to interview me as a coach (they do) I have the right not to comment (I don't) because I decide not to purchase their coverage for that price.

The market decides the price point - if people are paying the price point is fine. The problem is you are getting a different product across states. If you sign up in a state like Virginia you are getting a bargain at $48, but not all states are like that.

Milesplit succeeds because they have everything (even with mistakes) - Athletic.Net has it all but only in certain states plus they don't go out of their way to use that data...but that might change now they are owned by Runnerspace. Dyestat only puts in the top stuff and are lacking in a lot of places.

To answer your question about how hard can it be - I'm going to go with very hard. It's just a ton of information.

TFRRS is different - college coaches have to post results onto TFRRS so of course they have everything. Also, I think most of the work is done for them so there is less manual labor involved.

I remember when milesplit was free back when i was a freshman. I think they did have a paid version but I never felt limited. Then in my sophomore year they forced us to pay if we wanted to see our stats. This didn't bother me that much cause all I had to do was click the progression tab to bypass this and see my stats (and other athletes stats).

But today I logged on to see that there was no way to access stats even through the progression tab.

I guess the really sad thing is this is the same website that let me claim my athlete profile when I was a freshman and now I can't even view my own stats.

Milesplit in my opinion has pretty much a monopoly when it comes to online stat recording. Athletic.net has 10 of my races. Milesplit has over 40. No website will ever record all of my stats from all of my races but milesplit comes the closest. Until this changes they can continue to charge an arm and a leg and nobody can really stop them.

I don't like it and miss the old milesplit, but if theres money to be made by charging people the website will do it. And its hard to blame the milesplit staff, after all milesplit is a business.

With all that being said I do plan on buying a one month suscription towards the end of the xc season just so I can see the rankings (I know they're flawed but they're still fun to look at) and my profile.

High school senior

I don't know for sure but apparently Jason felt snubbed because the NCAA didn't ask him to help. I don't know why they wouldnt. He's a PHP HTML genius.

http://www.letsrun.com/forum/flat_read.php?thread=3276774

https://twitter.com/USTFCCCA/status/448170672410210304

Milesplit supporter here. Nobody bothers to cover the local prep running scene in the mountain west but where I'm at Alan Versaw does mad work and puts it one place for me. $48 is a deal from my perspective particularly since I can deduct the expense against a small amount of writing and merch income. Not all runners operate on ramen and misplaced injustices, some of us will gladly pay for quality work at a fair price point. Cheers Alan.

I'll add that one feature I really enjoy is the site will periodically follow-up with results of area runners who are competing in the college ranks. No idea if other sites provide that kind of thing but it's awesome.

I likely wouldn't go for the $20 /mo. package that Flotrack offers if they tried to combine subscriptions. Might be interested in some hybrid package above the current $48 plan but only marginally. A $40 add-on or something would be about tops depending on the extras that would be offered with it.

Gonna defend Milesplit here. I was against it initially, but I am a paid member and it is worth every penny. Wejo mentioned Athletic.net, but that site is horrible for results here in Ohio. The Ohio Milesplit does an amazing job. My freshman in college daughter and I used Milesplit to see if college coaches were helping their runners IMPROVE while there...helped us eliminate a couple of colleges. I will continue to be a paid member until my son is out of high school, and then, who knows, I might do it beyond that even.

Awesome to see by the next day how my son and his teammates stack up against others in Ohio, others nationally...can sort by class. They even have some good videos and interviews of race winners.

Excellent job Milesplit! Keep it up!

Athletic.net is a good site, but it is driven by the coaches. The coaches are the ones who upload their results. It is $70.00 a year for 'Site Supporters' to manage meets, and coaches get some customized reports. I do not think that athletic.net envisions itself as a 'go to' for results, but more of a 'stats' site. The more coaches use it, the better it is. It is the sites they compile results for the individual states that do most of the work. Milesplit and athletic.net just piggyback off of those.

I do understand that frustration of losing out on this tool. Up until the other day you were able to see the basic stuff of what someone ran each meet but had to pay to see more detailed rankings and info. I agree with having to pay for the detailed rankings but I do believe the public has the right to access these results for free of seeing your straight up time in a particular race.

Without the results the stats at athletic.net are extremely limited. We have more stats AND our personnel has more dexterity. It's a great infrustructure.

I don't know about other states but for NY state tullyrunners.com

keps track of all the results etc. why would anybody pay just to look at results.

You can look up results on timing companies websites if you really 'need' to look at them.

KevinL wrote:

In Ohio (for example), MileSplit knows a school's League, Distirct, Regional, and Division (Size).

So I (as a paying customer) can click "Virtual Meet" and select my district, and I get the predicted results (based on PR or based on Avg Time, my choice) for my district meet.

I can also click "Virtual Meet" and choose the teams manually, if I know the teams that will be at my invite next week.

It helps me explain / demonstrate to my athletes who their competition is.

Dig deeper (by clicking on an athlete name) and you get a chronological race history for the runner at each distance.

I can admit, I DON'T subscribe for the articles.

This is pretty much how we use it as well. They have significantly more results than Athletic.net and Dyestat, and like the previous poster mentioned, a more powerful search engine that allows us to quickly find stats on opponents. One feature my kids love is the ability to score meets or rank teams based on #8-14 or #15-21 runners. Our JV team is really into that and it's helped them buy into the team aspect and get more competitive. All 3 sites have inconsistencies with the level of coverage between states, but I think Milesplit covers more states in depth because they hire state level experts.

Our Milesplit state site also does a good job of writing race previews and recaps, taking race videos, posting pictures. The level of that coverage varies by state though, so it may be worth $48 to some, but not to others.

In Ilinois, both milesplit and dyestat are good resources. athletic.net not so much. both dyestat and milesplit have IL specific high school commentary (video and print) in addition to race results. I pay monthly for milesplit for the access to virtual meet tool even though it's not completely accurate (some athletes are listed twice so it screws up the team score) but with a good eye you can correct that and 95% of your work is done for you.

Official Flotrack Employee wrote:

Look, we do a lot of work. We go to all of the results websites and copy their pre-parsed hytek files and paste them into a super awesome program Jason Byrne wrote all by himself (he majored in Spanish). Then we organize it which takes a long time.

We need to eat too. Our job isn't like your typical 9-5. Some of us work 10-14 hours per day on it. Old people don't understand this because they don't know everything that goes into it.

In addition: I don't know how many other milesplit people do this, but since I really want the database to be as complete as possible, when people who send in results refuse to send in something other than a copy which we can't copy and paste into the program, I individually type out every result into an excel sheet so we can copy and paste into the program. Just for the first week of results in our state this past week, I had to type out at least ten different meet results. Luckily, most of them were small meets.