XCStats News

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  1. Special Offer for New Subscribers
  2. All New App for Athletes!
  3. Resting Heart Rate (RHR) Monitoring
  4. Track & Field - Import Results from Webpage
  5. Track & Field - Track Point-Getters all Season
  6. Track & Field - Set Qualification Criteria
  7. Workout Performance Report
  8. Medley Optimizer
  9. Attendance Management for Cross Country and Track & Field
  10. XCStats as your Website
  11. Meet Planner for Track & Field
  12. XCStats Guest Pass Now Available
  13. Finally, an SAT Score For Running
  14. Refresher Training Program

Special Offer for New Subscribers

Want to try XCStats Cross Country or Track & Field for next-to-nothing? We have an amazing offer for new subscribers. See the subscription page for the special offer. No strings attached, no reduced feature set. You'll get all the reports and graphs, the email system, text messaging, goal setting, training logs, mobile apps, Google Docs and MS SkyDrive integration, team discussion forum, a web site and team management tools including Attendance Management! See the full list of features for Cross Country and Track & Field. All for one astonishingly low price! Sign up today.

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All New App for Athletes!

App

We've had an iPhone and Android app for many years, but now we've completely redesigned it and added a bunch of new features!

The App provides all the functions that athletes need to perform. This includes setting cross country and track & field goals, entering training logs, emailing coaches, creating absence requests, uploading their photo and creating new accounts. The App is written in the native development tools for ios and android so it has the best possible user interace.

The new features added by this new App are creating track goals, making absence requests, creating their account and uploading photos.

All of these functions are also available on the website for athletes who don't own smart phones.

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Resting Heart Rate Monitoring

App

We've added a full set of features to enable coaches to monitor and chart their kids' heart rates and be alerted when they exceed certain limits.

Athletes either their resting heart rates, either on the XCStats App or the website. Coaches then have a variety of tools to review that data, including:

  • A weekly view showing their daily heart rate and workout information.
  • That view includes highlighting the heartrate when it increases rapidly.
  • Coaches can chart the daily heart rate.
  • A daily email is generated showing the heart rate for the current day and past week. Sudden increases in the heart rate are highlighted.

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Track & Field - Import results from Webpage!

Import

With XCStats Track & Field, coaches load their own data. Now we've made that task a whole lot easier! All you is input the URL of the webpage where the results exist and the software will extract your teams' results and load them into XCStats! What could be easier! The method accompanies our 3 other methods of entering results - Direct Entry, File Upload and Copy/Paste from File.

This new method can often import relays also.

 

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Track & Field - Track Point-Getters All Season Long

Create charts for each division which show your leading point-gettings all season long. Overlay different athletes to encourage competition.

 

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Track & Field - Set Qualification Criteria

Enter the qualification standards for progressing to the next round of competition and generate reports showing accomplishment of those standards.

 

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Workout Performance Report

Workout Perf report

Some of the best training methods are based on creating competition amongst your team. This increases everyones fitness and builds comraderie at the same time. This report lists the Top 10 performances for your standard workouts over a variety of time periods. Each of your workouts can be an opportunity for your athletes to shine!

The flexible time periods are key. The report includes the following filtering options:

  • This Week
  • Last Week
  • Last 90 Days
  • All Time
  • All Time, no Grads
  • Custom Dates

Another feature is related to managing the validity of the report. If times are entered that are in error or not legitimate, the coach has the ability to disqualfy that entry from the report.

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Medley Optimizer

How do you pick your medley team? It can be very complicated, with many possible combinations and ever-changing athlete availability for certain races. But this is what computers are good at! Based on your top performing athletes in each event in the medley, and their availabilty, we show you the top 10 combinations for fastest medley team. You can quickly run multiple scenarios to explore alternatives.

Medley Optimizer

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Attendance Management

We've added some exciting new features to XCStats. Here's a summary:

Follow Any Athlete
  • Follow Selected Athletes!
  • Each season we collect hundreds of thousands of race results from California. We have nearly every runner in the state! We've added a feature where subscribing coaches, athletes and parents can build and save a custom list of athletes to follow all season. The report includes all key statistics and makes for easy comparisons between athletes. The report also contains team results including all team members and their times.

    XCStats users can select specific athletes from their own school or use general searches across our entire database. Results can be previewed prior to saving so the search can easily evaluated and adjusted as necessary. The results are drawn from the current season, or both the current and previous season. To compare athletes on like courses, the report can be filtered by a specific course, showing only those courses.

Attendance List Attendance Summary
  • Attendance Management!
  • We've built a full range of functions to save you time recording daily attendance and to help you report and summarize the data. Most excitingly, you can now take attendance from your mobile device with XCStats! In real-time, you'll press or click on the appropriate button indicating their status for the day, as shown to the right. The number of each attendance status is dynamically calculated as you record them. Coaches can use the Custom Group feature to only show their desired list of athletes on the attendance form.

    Tim Brink, Head Track and Field Coach at Crean Lutheran HS, says:
    "The new attendance feature has been an amazing organizational tool and incredible time-saver. I currently have two to three other coaches using their mobile devices to take attendance every day for different groups. Furthermore, the reporting features have made it easy to track cumulative stats throughout the season."

    In addition to real-time recording, we've built new forms for athletes, parents and coaches to record planned absences. When submitted, a confirming email is sent to the coach and that absence is indicated on the daily tally sheet so the coach is reminded of it during attendance-taking.

    XCStats includes on-screen and exportable summary and daily attendance reports for monitoring athletes compliance with team rules. This feature applied to both Cross Country and Track & Field.

Planned Absences
  • Planned Absences
  • Keeping track of planned absences can be a bookeeping nightmare. Parents or athletes tell coaches verbally or send an email or text, but they are easily lost. That's where the XCStats planned absence features can help.

    Athletes and parents can use specially designed forms to notify their coach of upcoming planned absences. Once submitted, an email is sent to the coach informing him/her of the absence. It is also captured in the attendance database and displayed on the attendance-recording form and report so it is not forgotten.

    If the parent or athlete is not registered in XCStats, and therefore don't have access to their planned absence forms, no problem. The coach can enter the planned absence themselves, therefore insuring that it is recorded and visible when the date arrives.

    The attendance reporting features gives the coach visiblity to accumulated absences, both planned and unexcused, throughout the season.

Templates
  • File Folders and Icons
  • The file upload feature has become so popular that we needed to provide a way to better organize the many files. So, we introduced File Folders for uploaded files! You now can store files in folders and we've provided 3 levels of sub foldering for the ultimate in organization. As you can see in the picture, we've also added icons representing the file type, providing more information about the file before the user downloads it.

    Files continue to have the complete access control settings, where coaches can require that the user be logged in before accessing the file. Files can also be uploaded and not displayed, which is useful for including images or links in emails.

    The Coach's Control Panel provides an easy user interface for adding, modifying and deleting folders and files.

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XCStats as your Website

 

  • Publish Web Pages!
  • You can now publish virtually any type of document on your own XCStats web site. This new feature increases the utility of XCStats so that it becomes a fully customizable, yet simple to maintain website. As examples, publish a calendar of all workouts, meets and travel details. Or create a volunteer page so your community can log on and sign up for particular jobs. Or write-up a meet summary and highlight those athletes who ROCK. Build as many pages as they want. As you do, XCStats creates tabs so your team can easily navigate through them.

    This new feature eliminates the need to maintain your own site or deal with complex applications or advertising-strewn free sites! Instead, create word processing or spreadsheet files with the Microsoft Office Suite or Google Docs and publish them on XCStats. You can also publish photo galleries from Flickr or Photobucket, or videos from YouTube or display any other web page on your XCStats site. Each page is linked from a tab, as shown below. There is no limit to the number of pages that can be displayed. Pages can be automatically moved to an archive tab when they are out of date.

    If you don't have a web site or don't like the one you have, this is an incredibly easy way to build and maintain a site. You simply create files with your current applications and upload to Google Docs, or create them directly in Google Docs - the user interface is very similar to the Office applications. No need to know html or web site publishing.

    If you have a web site and are happy with it, you still might want to use this feature for some purposes, such as volunteer signup pages (because creating visitor-editable web pages is so difficult). Calendars are time consuming to produce as web pages, but are a snap with Google Docs (we even provide a calendar template). Also, any coach can publish pages, so all the work doesn't have to go through a single webmaster.
Publish Pages

Pop Up PR Report
  • Pop Up PR Report
  • Seeing the list of new PR's is faster than ever. We have a new Pop-Up PR report that is linked from a schools' Cross Country (and Track & Field) home page so you can see the list of new PR's from any meet throughout your history with a single click. And these are true PR's! With XCStats Cross Country we compare past performances against the exact course AND distance so accurate PR's are determined.
Templates
  • Templates
  • In conjunction with our new page publishing feature, we've built a variety of ready-to-use templates for coaches to use as a starting point for their own pages. We've created calendar templates for every month, a volunteer sign-up sheet and a newsletter. These were produced in Microsoft Word so you can edit them in Word or upload them to Google Drive or Microsoft SkyDrive and edit from there. Changes you make in those files will immediately be updated to your site visitors. Editable documents are automatically hidden from visitors who are not logged in to your XCStats site. These allow a coach to quickly publish pages without any knowledge of html or other special applications.

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Meet Planning for Track & Field

We added some exciting new features to XCStats/Track & Field!

  • Meet Planner
  • It's time consuming to assign your athletes to their respective events and divisions before every meet, then communicate the plan to the athletes parents and other coaches, all while dealing with constant changes. This problem is what the XCStats Meet Planning tool addresses. It provides a easy-to-use tool to assign athletes to the different events/divisions, then with a click, post the Meet Plan to your XCStats Track and Field home page.

    The planning tool automatically checks that you don't have a same athlete assigned to two different divisions at the same meet. It also provides a view by athlete so you can always see how many events each athlete is participaing in.
Meet Plan
Competitive Analysis
  • Competitive Analysis
  • Here's something fun. Just as you load your own results into XCStats, you can load that of your competitors! Just locate their results on a site where it is posted, then copy and paste it into XCStats. From there you can create performance lists which compare you against them. Then, use this information to adjust your meet plan using our new planning tool.

    You might know more about your competitor than they do themselves!

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XCStats Guest Pass Now Available

Absolutely free, XCStats now offers a Guest Pass allowing visitors exclusive access to data and content previously unavailable. The Pass provides access to our massive cross country database. Get your Guest Pass now! Database Search Options
  • Free Access to the XCStats California Cross Country Database
  • With nearly 1,000,000 race performances and over 1,000 meets, and our robust search and reporting tools, you can spend hours researching your favorite runners and teams. XCStats provides Guests with 6 different search methods for both individual and team results: by runner or school name, by event and by course. With these features you can create reports such as:
  • The entire career for searched runners.
  • Find the varsity (or JV, F/S) team performances for a given school this season or many seasons.
  • Get the race results for over a thousand meets (and over 10,000 races) since 2005. No more navigating through page after page of listings.
  • Find the top performances at a given course during a season, for example, who ran the fastest time at Mt. Sac in 2010.
  • See how runners and teams compare for a given event if they all particpated in the same race.

The tool is especially useful for helping college coaches identify promising recruits! The Guest Pass is free. Sign up here.

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Finally, an SAT Score For Running

We developed this in late 2010, but it's just too cool not to mention. Most high school kids get feedback on their level of education relative to others via the famous and dreaded Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT). We've developed the same thing at XCStats! We can tell every runner the percentile of their performance relative to thousands of other high school kids have run the same course. Essentially, it's the "bell curve" for nearly every course in California. Below is an example from Mt. Sac. The Y axis is the size of the population and the X axis is the time to run the 2.93 mile course. The vertical line is draw at 17:40, which happens to be the 50% percentile for varsity boys runners.

Mt Sac Distribution

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Training Sessions Offered

Coaches - need to brush up on your XCStats skills from last year? Or want some personalized training on the new features? Just attend an XCStats Refresher training session! Sessions are scheduled frequently. Sign up on the subscription page. Just select "Attend a Training Session" in the form. All are free.

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