The legacy zone4 PC based timing software had the concept of “Categories” that you could organize into Parent and Sub categories. Racer could only be assigned to a single category and had to select one at registration time. This concept worked OK for ski races where people can elect to race up or down into a different age group from their assigned age, but the concept was limiting when it came to setting up more complex races. This also became a pain when setting up running races and loppets that had many different distances, age groups, and techniques.
Because of this limitation in the old timing software, the registrations needed to be setup as seen on the right with each possible combination of Distance, Gender, and Age specified in a single multi-option field.
In the new Zone4 timing software, this is not required because Start Groups, Course Groups, and Result Groups are defined based on any combination of fields. So now, the registration can be setup like this pictured on the right.
- One field for Gender
- One field for Distance
- One field for Age
In Zone4 Timing, you would most likely create your “Start Groups” based on your “Distance” field so that each distance starts as a group at their own mass start time. In the example below, the option to “Define start groups using racer fields” is selected, then the “Choose your Distance” field from the registration was selected, and each of the values from that field became a Start Group (15km and 30 km)
Likewise, the Course Grouping would most likely be based on the same Distance field. See Create Start Lists and Device Setup for more info.
For your result sets, you would likely create several result sets as follows:
- An Overall Result set based on just the Distance field which would show the overall winners of each distance. By default, results are grouped by Course so we don’t need to select any registration field to get Overall by Distance.
- An Overall Gender Result set based on both the Distance and Gender field showing the winner of each Distance in each Gender. In this case, by simply adding the Gender field to a result set, we see that it has created each permutation of 15 km Male, 15 km Female, 30 km Male, 15 km Female.
-
And finally, we will most likely want another Result Set by Age and Gender. By adding the Age field and specifying our age groups, and then our Gender field, the system automatically creates each of the Result Groups according to the combinations possible from your data.
See Setting up Results for more info.