Divisioning, A rule that might be accomodated Options

[Ted Hope]

I'm fresh off a large Special Olympics Championship Game and have discovered we could use an addition to the Divisioning process. The rules we work with require a maximum of 25% difference between fastest and slowest qualification or preliminary times - GMS does this very well. We also have to accomodate a rule that prohibits divisions of fewer than 3 athletes whenever there are 3 or more entrants in an Event. For example, we have 7 athletes divisioned as: 2 in division 1, 5 in division 2. Not permitted. We can have a 3,4 divisioning or a 4,3 divisioning only.

For example, in our Game, we had 107 athletes in an Event. They were divisioned 1,1,3,7,8,8,7,8,1,1 for female athletes and similar for male athletes. Using the Divisioning Matrix did not assist us and manual redivisioning seemed the only recourse. Redivisioning required manual changes to all 10 divisions. Manual divisioning of 8 Events with nearly 150 athletes in a max of 6 events each took us over 3 hr. We need this time to shrink to say 20 seconds! (I can division 1200 athletes in 160 Events, 4 Events each athlete....in 3 seconds with another piece of software I use (not Special Olympics-capable, however).

How? I want to select all the events to be divisioned from a drop-down list, in my case 8 events. The minimum 3 athletes per event rule is active; the max 25% rule is active; I push the Go button and it's done -20 seconds. When a conflict of rules exists, minimum of 3 athletes takes precedence over the 25% rule. The only other wrinkle is that athletes with no qualification time are given a time of 0:00.00 and are divisioned accordingly.

[Alpha Geek]

Ted, most of these are not possible in a real world. While SO rules prohibit small divisions, GMS is not smart enough to know how the smaller divisions should be combined together, or completely re-done. Instead, it blindly follows the percentile, age group and gender rules its provided, and relies on a human - who does understand the subtleties of athletes and divisioning - to do the cleanup work. Until GMS can do this by itself, bulk divisioning isn't realistic, since you'd still have to have a trained person go into every event and clean up the results, and in most cases (speaking from my experience working at state and regional events) run the process again with modified rules in order to get a better start.