It's end-of-year housecleaning time with the Colorado Track XC database. Please let us know of misspelled athlete names in the database, duplicate pages, etc.

Colorado Track XC will be used for online registration for all Colorado rankings meets this spring. This is to provide the state with a unified entry system, thereby--at least in theory--eliminating the possibility of athletes appearing in the rankings multiple times.

Toward that end, we are working hard right now to clear up as many misspellings, duplications, and other related issues as we can.

But there are a few things to consider along the way. One of the biggest issues in an endeavor such as this is what to do with names that don't follow the usual conventions. For example, what do you do with an athlete who goes by three names, such as Sugar Ray Leonard and Amy Van Dyken. It's very difficult to write code to divine the intent here. In the first case, we know Leonard is the last name and Sugar Ray what he goes by. In the second case, it's the last name that is compounded--Van Dyken. But making that kind of distinction is something the human brain does much better than computer code.

So, to clear that problem up as much as possible, Colorado Track XC is "sliding together" compounded last names. In Amy Van Dyken's case, that means her name would be stored in the MileSplit database as "VanDyken." It may not be perfect, but it resolves a number of issues. Since I have a bit of Dutch heritage myself (and married into still more of it), I'm pretty comfortable in doing that with Dutch surnames. I'm not nearly as clear how that works with Hispanic and Asian names. I'm very much open to instruction on how best to handle that situation where names of Hispanic or Asian heritage are concerned.

Another recurring issue is one of last names sometimes hyphenated and sometimes not. I can find multiple instances of athletes in the database once as something like Smith-Jones and another time as just Smith. I don't have a preference which way you do it, it just needs to be done consistently--all season long. Please let me know how you want it and we'll merge the multiple profiles into a single, preferred profile. Please keep in mind that college coaches regularly tap into the MileSplit database to look at athletes' performance histories. If you want college coaches to see you according to your full, legal name then it's probably best that we merge your profiles to reflect your full, legal name. A site administrator is the only one who can merge athlete profiles, so you need to let me know (e-mail address at the bottom left corner of this page) if you have multiple athlete profiles in the system.

Missing, or incorrect, years of graduation are another thing we'd like to clean up before track meets start this spring.

And, finally, if you are a coach who is registered as a team admin for your school, please go to your team page, go to team administration, and check and see if all of the indicated team administrators are still coaches at your school. Let me know if any are not. I am happy to delete for you any team admistrators who should no longer be there. While you're there, it's probably worth checking through your roster to move athletes from active to inactive or from inactive to active, as indicated. If an athlete just does track or just does cross country, however, it's easier and cleaner to click on "Remove from Track" or "Remove from XC" on the team roster page, as necessary, than to make an athlete active or inactive with each change of season. An athlete should be moved to inactive only if he/she is no longer participating in either track and field or cross country. 

By the way, coaches, you do have the capability of changing the spelling of an athlete's name. From the team roster page (in team admin mode), click on the athlete's name. This will bring up the athlete page and enable you to edit things like gender (if incorrectly entered), spelling of name, year of graduation, and the like. If you need to make any of these changes, please do them before the outdoor season starts and not sometime during the season. Doing so during the season will create duplicates in the rankings database. If you have alumni showing on your team roster page, the best way to clear those names is to add their year of graduation. If the year of graduation is 2011 or earlier, they will automatically be moved to your school's alumni page with the next update of the database (never more than 24 hours out).

Coaches, if you need any help with this, please send me a quick e-mail and help guide you through the process.