Timers are the backbone of the race community. Unlike many volunteer race directors, and even professionals, they are the professionals who help with 10-300 races each year. And for an event to be called a “Race”, there kind of needs to be timing. It is why RunSignup has long worked to help timers with an open platform that supports all of the various timing software and hardware solutions in the market. We also have invested in making sure that timers have access to a set of tools that we can help learn from and make better with our RaceDay Technology Suite.
An important part of that suite is our scoring software, RaceDay Scoring and our legacy The Race Director. This blog provides some statistics on the use of our scoring software. As usual, we like to share the information and analysis we do to help others in the endurance community. And there are some interesting statistics that come out of this that also show the comeback from the pandemic is upon us. A few caveats – we are still refining how we collect and report these statistics. They also do not include races that might be timed offline, or use older versions of software. But there is enough data to be reliable.
Races Scored
These graphs show 2019, 2021, 2022 and 2023 Races that were scored with our software:
Finishers Scored
The good news from both of these graphs is that people are back to running races.
What is not understandable from our reporting capabilities is a comparison of races that were using the software in 2019 and see what happened to those races. The 2023 number may be influenced by a different mix of races, and it is also likely influenced as there has been some migration from some of the older platforms like RunScore to RaceDay Scoring as older timers need a more modern system to onboard new staff as this interview with Ryan Walsh explains.
Number and Size of Timers
We looked at data for timing companies who have licenses to our scoring products and counted the number of races each had. We have a wide variety of timer sizes using our software:
The other interesting statistic is that over 25% of those timers have started or moved to our platform in the past 2 years. We do not have good reporting that shows us “churn” of timers, nor historical data to compare against. Our anecdotal observation is that the pandemic caused some timers to close their businesses. Our other anecdotal observation is that there seem to be more new, younger timers starting up over the past year than ever before.
Transition from The Race Director to RaceDay Scoring
Roger Bradshaw, the creator of The Race Director, joined us in 2015. In 2018, we introduced RaceDay Scoring as the follow on product and that we would gradually sunset The Race Director in 5 years (December, 2023 – this year!). While we will continue to support users, we will not be making improvements and can not guarantee that it will support all new version of operating systems since it relies on FoxPro under the covers. Roger continues to say he wants to be a part of our team forever, and we are fortunate to have him not only to continue supporting users of The Race Director, but also to guide the creation of features for RaceDay Scoring (he loves learning from all the mistakes he made in his past and getting a chance to redo things :-)).
This chart shows the past 12 months ending June 30, 2023:
The most recent quarter saw about 33% of races scored with RaceDay Scoring. It is now capable of doing all of the things The Race Director did, plus more, plus better, plus easier.
Chip Systems
This data has a lot of historical alignment in it. For example, Ipico used to bundle The Race Director before Active acquired them, so there are a fair amount of Ipico races. Also some unusual ones like Agee Timing, who you would think would use Agee Scoring – those are from a timer or two who dual score for various reasons.
Summary
This is the first time we have published some of this data, although some of it is contained in our yearly Race Trends report. Let us know what you think.
Also, here is a cut and paste from a Timers Talk thread on how much people are loving RaceDay Scoring:
