Please get in touch with us before your series begins to make sure our system will work for your series points calculation rules and that you’re collecting the necessary information on your race registration.
For race series that award points to racers based on their ranking at each stage, you can use the Zone4 Series Poinst feature. To get started, navigate to your Organization page by clicking on it at the top of the list:
Then scroll down to the Race Series section and click the Create a Race Series button. Enter a name for your race series, and click Save.
Unique Racer ID
Racers are matched up between each race of the series by some unique identifier. Choosing a good identifier is critical to the series points calculation, if you choose a weak identifier you’ll have to spend a lot of time correcting racers in order for the series points to be calculated correctly. There are a few options for this:
- Exact name match – this is fairly brittle, as racers will consistently mis-spell their name, or use an abbreviation or nickname at some races and not at others, and racers with even a slight mis-spelling will be treated as different racers.
- Zone4 Registrant ID – if all the races in your series are importing registrants from the same registration form, you can link racers by their registrant ID. However, if racers are coming back and registering more than once on the same registration form they will have a different registrant ID each time they register, so the registrant ID is not a suitable identifier for series points
- Zone4 Person ID – the Zone4 registration system tries to assign a unique person ID to each registrant, that is consistent across all registrations. This is calculated based on their name, postal code, and email address. This is a fairly reliable unique identifier to use for series points calculation, as long as all your racers will be coming from a Zone4 registration form. Racers entered directly into the race file will not have a Zone4 person ID.
- Licence or other sport-specific identifier – If all your racers have a unique licence that they can enter on the registration form, this makes an ideal unique identifier.
- Any other registration field – using other registration fields is not recommended unless an administrator is going through and checking all the data in that field to ensure is is unique, correct, and filled in for each racer before each race is imported into the series.
Setting Up
Series points calculation in Zone4 is based on the principle that there is a set number of points awarded to each rank. Anything based on percentages or calculations is not supported.
How many points to award
To tell the system how many points to award to each racer, first enter how many racers will be awarded points. Once you have done this, you’ll see a field for how many points to award to this racer. In the following example, we’ve set up a series where the top 5 racers in each stage are awarded points, with first place getting 100 points, second place getting 50 points, third place getting 25 points, fourth place getting 15 points, and fifth place getting 5 points:
How many races to count
For many race series, you will only want to count each racer’s best races, for example the best 4 of 5 races. To do this, beside the Races to Count setting, change the option from Count all Races to Only count each racer’s best races. You can then enter the number of races that should be counted for each racer. When racers have completed fewer than that number of races, all their races will be counted towards their series points total.
Importing Results from each Race in the Series
After each race in your series finishes, go to the Imported Races page for your series, click the Import a Race button. In the list of races, select the appropriate race, and then select the Result Format that has racers ranked in the order they should be awarded series points (for example, if the race has both an “overall” result set and a “category” results set, and racers get 200 points for coming first in their category, make sure you select the Category results.)
When you’ve selected the correct result set and unique racer id, click on the “Import Results” button. This will open a window showing exactly what points will be imported. Anybody without an alberta membership number will be highlighted in red, and their points will be crossed out. Scroll through this list to double-check that nobody from alberta is going to be excluded. If a category name doesn’t match, that will also be highlighted in red on this screen. If you think it looks good, click the blue “Import these Points” button at the bottom. If anything needs to be corrected, you’ll have to do that in the actual race file – not in the series.
When you are importing racers, it uses the result group name to match the categories. Each result group on your second race results must exactly match the result group name on the result set for the first race. If it doesn’t, a new category will be added to the series.