$48/year to use Milesplit?

justrun1183 wrote:

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'll just offer my perspective as a coach that it's kind of a pain to upload results into athletic.net (our section started requiring this last year for track in order to validate marks for high-level invitationals), and rarely my highest priority during the season. If I didn't need to do it in order to get my kids into meets, I wouldn't.

The easiest results collector I've used so far is XCStats dot com. For XC, they actually collect all my team's results for me, and for track it's usually as simple as copy & paste. Makes tracking PRs and records for large teams easy. Plus email, attendance, web publishing, and other tools.

In Maryland I think Athletic.net is awesome- as others have said obv it depends how many coaches are loading results in but if most everyone is doing you see the results from every meet. I dont have the subscription but I dont really need it. This doesnt apply quite as much to privates as they are somewhat separate in our state and they dont use it as much but for the public schools I think it is great.

Good while it lasted wrote:

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.

Why do you believe that? In most cases, Milesplit isn't the only place to see race results. Usually the timing company has results, and if it's a good timing company, those results are posted quickly. Why should a website put in work to maintain a bunch of race results for you to easily find for free?

Srsly tho, $4 a month is one latte.

ONE LATTE

thnx

In PA a lot of the races require you to use milesplit to register for races. Coaches pay the same as individuals, doesn't make sense does it?

Individuals will look at results for their kid and maybe some competitors, A coach will use it to find and register for invites, check results for all their competitors, set up virtual races, etc.

OP is a total poor. Can we start a paypal account so this poor can afford 4 bucks a month? This poor probably clads his kids in Under Armour

Factmaniac wrote:

OP is a total poor. Can we start a paypal account so this poor can afford 4 bucks a month? This poor probably clads his kids in Under Armour

I agree. Only 4 dollars per month and everything the site offers. It's an AWESOME site.

Official Flotrack Employee wrote:

Factmaniac wrote:

OP is a total poor. Can we start a paypal account so this poor can afford 4 bucks a month? This poor probably clads his kids in Under Armour

I agree. Only 4 dollars per month and everything the site offers. It's an AWESOME site.

Based on what I've read so far, it seems like the California Milesplit must be way behind most of the other states because the content is soft and the results are scattered.

Are meet results Copyright or intellectual property?

I mean, can anyone create a consolidator site with results?

Do any meets say you can't distribute the results?

Why doesn't athlinks or someone just crawl all the local meets and put the pay per use sites out of business? I mean, competition is healthy, right?

Yeah results aren't intellectual property so I think anyone could make a results site. However, Milesplit doesn't charge to see results and therefore doesn't get any money (outside of the ad revenue that is) from results by themselves. Building a site with just results wouldn't really be competition.

Results are free on MileSplit, rankings and athlete profile pages are not.

Coaches do not have to be subscribers on MileSplit to do online registration.

There is a fee for online registration, but there is anywhere else you do it, too--like Direct Athletics, Athletic.net, RunnerCard, and so on. Online registration is a convenience for a meet, not a right. Conveniences come at a cost.

Guess what? Timing companies charge events to time their races, too. That's another convenience that comes at a cost.

Most services come with costs. If you don't like the cost, do it yourself. Make your own athlete profile page. Make your own rankings.

I don't know of any place that charges to view raw results, except the timing company itself which charges to do the meet and produce those raw results. For the record, MileSplit does a fairly decent job of crediting the results to the timing company, and probably a better job than anyone else does.

Where did this allergy to paying someone to produce something for you come from? What makes you all think people should write code to do stuff for you for free?

Sheesh.

I fully support Jason's post above. 110%

The "allergy" is triggered by their deceptive marketing of what they label rankings. Their supposed rankings are what gets many people to pay in the first place. However, once you find out their rankings are in fact just a list of results, results that are free on their own site mind you, then you can see why people have an allergic reaction to that $48.

Milesplit is a great resource! Wonderful site with a amazing database for highschool track coaches and college coaches who are trying to recruit.

I find using milesplit akin to dating a tease. Everything is behind a paywall. the results are mostly screwed up. I have coached at meets where the results were hand timed and showed up in the database as FAT - and with meet records.

The writers are functionally illiterate. JV results get a pass. If you are a friend of the site admin you can upload your hand timed quad meet and it is treated the same as a full FAT big time invite.

Coaches are expected to maintain the team site for free.

I keep my own stats. I do my own rankings. I showed them once and went 10/10 in a district race. Virtual meet was not even close.

It is a classic case of junk in and junk out. But hey, people buy junk all the time.

Another internet ripoff - someone else does the work and they profit. See Twitter/instagram/tumblr/ etc.

I could care less about the 500th best HS girl in the district. I walk faster than she runs. Only the top matter and they are easy to track.

But the main beef? They can't do analysis and they write at a 4th or 5th grade level. It is insulting to pay 48.00 for trash.

Just my opinion.

And yes the trash is free here.

+1

Coming from Michigan a state that uses athletic.net extensively I can say it is awesome and so customizable. Many of the features that milesplit is promoting recently have been on athletic.net for years. There are hypothetical meets for all conferences, regions and state levels. In addition as a coach I can make a custom list or any meet or group I want and see how kids stack up individually or compile team scores as well.

Indoor? wrote:

Coming from Michigan a state that uses athletic.net extensively I can say it is awesome and so customizable. Many of the features that milesplit is promoting recently have been on athletic.net for years.

Are you kidding me? Milesplit has been more comprehensive than athletic.net from time immemorial. On top of that with Milesplit you get a professional HTML 5 programmer. Athletic.net is bland and without color or design. Someone else said it that $48 per year is one latte per month.

Official Flotrack Employee wrote:

Indoor? wrote:

Coming from Michigan a state that uses athletic.net extensively I can say it is awesome and so customizable. Many of the features that milesplit is promoting recently have been on athletic.net for years.

Are you kidding me? Milesplit has been more comprehensive than athletic.net from time immemorial. On top of that with Milesplit you get a professional HTML 5 programmer. Athletic.net is bland and without color or design. Someone else said it that $48 per year is one latte per month.

You may be right that it has been more comprehensive than athletic.net from time immemorial, but if it's not intuitively so, most people can not be expected to realize it.

Bottom line: focus less on blinging out your site for the purpose of sensory stimulation and instead put your energy into higher quality content. Less bark, more bite.