January 19, 2026

RunSignup RaceDay History

We have a long history of providing timers and races with great race day tools. We thought it would be fun to walk down memory lane to record some of the RunSignup RaceDay history… Also as a reminder that we continue to invest heavily in this technology and our products will continue to get better and better…

History: Table of Contents

2012 – Results Upload and Display

We first came out with Results back in 2012. It was pretty simple back then with the need to upload csv files. We did simple scoring for races with calculations for divisions (age and gender place grouping). We also calculated Age Grading (this was important to Bob since he was getting old).

In 2012, we also began introducing our API. Eric Cone, who was the founder of RaceIt at the time, was kind enough to share some of the work he had done so we could be somewhat compatible. This made it easier for third parties to integrate with both RaceIt and RunSignup – for example RunScore and The Race Director as we will talk about next.

2012-2014 – Alan Jones and RunScore

Richard Nichols, Stephen Sigwart and Alan Jones
at a January, 2014 meeting
discussing RunScore-RunSignup integration.

Alan Jones is the creator of RunScore, which for many years was the gold standard for timers to score races with. At the time probably 30-40% of timers in the US used RunScore.

We began working with Alan in 2012 to make it easy for RunScore timers to work with RunSignup – both downloading participant information and uploading results.

Alan and Bob met at a Chronotrack conference and realized that we had overlapped a number of times since Bob grew up in Vestal, NY, right across from Endicott where Alan lived. Alan and Bob’s Dad were both IBMers and Alan had taught Bob’s Dad APL. Both had watched the 1973 NY State XC Meet where Alan had scored the meet with a Mainframe version of RunScore. Alan started the Vestal XX a 20K race that Bob ran several times (and Alan likes to point out how Bob lost narrowly to Chip Bohm, the winner of that 1973 state XC meet). Alan actually posted the 40 years of results on the site, so you can see Bob’s loss in 1978...

We give an annual Alan Jones Timer of the Year Award each year since 2019 to honor Alan’s contributions to race day.

2012-2014 – Roger Bradshaw and The Race Director

The other big scoring package at the time was The Race Director with probably 30% market share. Like Alan, Roger had written The Race Director as a side project from his day job at Gerber/Nestle. Similar to Alan, Bob became friendly with Roger and developed a relationship of trust that would blossom into working together for over a decade and still going (see below).

Roger did an integration with RunSignup to make it easy for The Race Director timers to work with RunSignup race participant information and to post results and do txt notifications.

2014 – TXT & Email Result Notifications

We introduced TXT and Email Result Notifications in early 2014, and by March were able to handle 50,000 notifications per hour.

This proved very popular with races and timers. We went back and forth on how to charge for this because of the expense before settling on providing it for free.

We decided that providing more tools to timers was going to be a core part of our business model. We realized that both RunScore and The Race Director were legacy applications not really built for the modern era. We came up with a long term plan to write our own scoring software that would try to combine the best of both RunScore and The Race Director.

RunScore had the positive of a very flexible tool that allowed timers to created custom code, called Listings, that could manage, manipulate and produce results in any fashion that could be imagined. The downside was that it had a flat file format for data. The Race Director had a relational database model, but lacked the flexibility of Listings. We came up with a rough architecture that would combine the best of both worlds. We also decided that having a relational data model to move from would be far easier for future migration when we came out with our next generation product.

This also fit Roger’s concept of what he wanted. He wanted other people to help support the product. He saw that his product was going to reach a point where it was not maintainable. He wanted to be part of the team to create a next gen product, and lend all of the hard won lessons of building scoring software for the past 30 years.

That relationship has worked out exactly as we had imagined it. Roger is still with RunSignup and has been a key part of the building of RaceDay Scoring and our other products. He still maintains and supports The Race Director for the decreasing number of timers who still use it. He has also developed a full test suite for RaceDay Scoring. He is on the “Roger Bradshaw Plan” where he is decreasing his time commitment by 10% each year and wants a 10% pay reduction to go with it so he doesn’t feel guilty. He is on year 5 of that 10 year plan, but I have a feeling we will probably both want to keep it going for longer…

Over the past several years Bob had met and become friendly with James Harris, the creator of RaceJoy. RaceJoy was a work of technical genius – combining Cloud, Mobile, GPS and Results. James and Bob started talking about a vision of the future where we could combine a next gen scoring product with real time splits, results and tracking via GPS and chip. And we realized we were far better trying to do this together. James, and his wife Shelly who had partnered with him in creating RaceJoy, joined RunSignup in March, 2015.

James turned out to be a real genius. And had a talent for recognizing talent and building a development team. James is our CTO for all of our RaceDay products today. He leads the team, and does code directly himself. He and Matt Avery work hand in hand to put together the roadmap for all of our EventDay products (it has expanded from just Races to include Tickets, Volunteers, Fundraisers and Membership now).

Matt joined us in May of 2015. He had been a timing customer, and Bryan Jenkins had developed a bond with him, recognizing his talent. At the time we needed a real timer to help support our customers. Also, with the investments the company had made bringing Roger and James on board, it was clear we would need more talent in this area.

Matt has become the EventDay Product Manager. He works at the intersection of what our customers want and what we can fit into the development schedule. He was a The Race Director power user, and has had well formed opinions of what we build. Along with Roger and James, they have formed the backbone of our RaceDay strategy and execution over the past decade.

RaceDay Scoring

The major investment we have made over the past 8 years has been RaceDay Scoring. Here is a photo from 2018 with Roger Bradshaw, Matty Avery, Michael Chisolm (now a lead developer on our RaceDay team), James Harris and Stephen Sigwart (our CTO for the Platform). Talented group…

RunSignup RaceDay History: RaceDay Scoring meeting in 2018

Here is the timeline of releases:

2017 – Alpha
2018 – Beta
2019 – V1 – first production release
2019 – V2 – Adding Corrals, Aggregate Team Scoring, Custom Top Finishers and Printing
2021 – V3 – Cross Country Scoring
2022 – V3 – Incremental – Custom report sorting, backup to cloud, Lap Race scoring, Renew Scoring setup
2023 – V4 – Improved performance and user experience. Increased flexibility for read management
2025 – V5 – RealTime Capabilities – Speed improvements, Realtime data checks and automations, Realtime Splits, Participant tracking, RaceJoy Integration

With the release of V5 in 2025, we have achieved our goals of creating the best product in the market for scoring for timers. RaceDay Scoring has become the obvious choice. And we are far from finished investing in this great product with plans for a V6 in 2026.

RaceDay CheckIn

Our most popular product. Our RaceDay CheckIn app handled 6.4 Million checkins in 2025 alone across over 16,000 races. This app has brought Dynamic Bib Assignment to be the common methodology at races, eliminating lines and saving hours of pre race work.

RaceDay Checkin first came out in 2015 and was immediately used by races as large as 10,000 participants. We followed that with a V2 re-write in 2017 and V3 in 2021. We continue to provide incremental updates – we end 2025 on V3.58! The checking app now support features like results kiosk mode, medical tent mode, checkin of volunteers, members and fundraisers. Full of features, events still find it takes minutes to train volunteers, with many just picking it up intuitively.

RaceJoy

RaceJoy was a very full featured product when James brought it to RunSignup in 2015. Since then, we have spent time tuning it to be more useful to our timers, who are then capable of deploying and supporting the GPS real time tracking to our customers. In 2025, RaceJoy was married more closely with RaceDay Scoring RealTime.

The key additional feature was adding participant tracking based on split points in a race. We have a proprietary algorithm that estimates pace and finish time as a person progresses thru the course and more split times come in. This works in parallel with the true real time GPS tracking capability RaceJoy has always had, but covers those who choose not to run with their phones.

In 2026 we will be rolling out a new User Interface to provide a more modern experience for participants and spectators.

RaceDay Mobile Timing App

We first announced the Mobile Timing App in 2022 as a modern version of “pull tag” finish line scoring that automatically integrated with our cloud based results. This provided a free alternative for small races. As we continued to iterate on releases, it became a modern replacement for Time Machines, and integrated with RaceDay Scoring to provide backup times as well as split times for Ultra types of events. In 2025 we released powerful Photo capabilities that made it seamless and easy to take photos with any phone and have the photos automatically uploaded and tagged in our Photo Platform.

In 2026 we plan on releasing AI detection of humans to allow for unattended photos to be taken. We are also releasing an Announcer Mode.

RaceDay Photos

Another incredibly popular product with over 30 Million photos uploaded and hosted for free on the RunSignup platform.

We introduced our free photo platform in 2017. We used early machine learning, an early form of AI, to auto-tag the photos. Since them tens of millions of photos have been uploaded by thousands of races. It is now super fast (seconds to tag) and appear within results pages based on bib number or time. This image shows the tagging in action – from back in 2017, and the AI has only gotten better and faster…

Pandemic Virtual Race and Challenge Support

During the pandemic, we shifted our focus to supporting virtual races with support for runners to upload their own results and video, as well as upload their watch files and their own photos into our platform. We also had a huge development product to support Challenges. Maps showing progress, milestone reports, virtual rewards and trophy cases were just some of the features we added to make these events compelling. RaceJoy introduced a Run Anywhere feature. These became a very popular event type that are still used today.

It is safe to say that Virtual Races and Challenges helped save our company and many of our customers during 2020. It was a great example of how we and our customers help each other.

RaceDay Mobile Timing App

This app started as a research project at Rowan University in early 2022. RunSignup then productized the app and released the Mobile Timing App V1 in September, 2022. Initially it was a modern alternative to the old pull-tag finish method done by hand with stop watches and tearing off bib tags and putting them on stringers and then manually matching places, times and runners. This was all done by the app and RunSignup Results.

Since then, it has expanded with doing automated backup timing and split times with RaceDay Scoring as a modern alternative to Time Machines and integrated with RaceDay Scoring.

In 2025, we introduced Photos into the Mobile Timing app. Anyone could quickly take photos and they would upload in the background to RunSignup Photos to be tagged and integrated with results. Later in 2025 we released unattended mode for taking a photo X seconds for Y amount of time, say every 5 second for a 2 hour period of time for finish line photos.

In 2026 we will be adding an Announcer Mode. We will also be introducing an AI algorithm that will take photos when there is a human in the shot. This will be great for split points and smaller events.

RunSignup Results has continuously improved since first introduced in 2012. It is now part of Website V2 and has features like customizable result page layouts, Live Leaderboards, and of course real time displays. In 2026 we will be introducing a next generation of our Results platform that will allow for customized Result Cover pages as well as integrated AI Chat for natural language results interactions. Here is a preview of what that will look like:

Individual Results will get a makeover as well.

Timer Dashboard

We’ve had a simple Timer Dashboard for years that allows timers to see their assigned races. In 2025 we began a deep integration with RaceDay Scoring to combine the power of the Cloud with local race technology. Annie shows some of the features like real time race status, being able to backup and update RaceDay Scoring, and monitor status like Checkin setup.

RunSignup has become the clear choice for RaceDay technology. We have a clear vision and commitment to providing a quality event day experience. We understand deeply the need to partner with timers who are the true professionals of the endurance community. And we have an incredibly talented and experienced team and a solid foundation to continue to build the best technology for race day.