Customer Snapshot
- Years Operating: 35+
- Event Types: road races, stair climbs, duathlons, triathlons
- Tools Used: RaceDay Scoring, RaceDay CheckIn App
The Origin of Bay State Race Services
It’s been almost 36 years since John and Debbie Burke (aka Bay State Race Services) timed their first race in November of 1988. Some members of John’s running club wanted to put on a Thanksgiving Day race in Andover MA but wanted to keep expenses at a minimum so John (an avid runner) and Debbie (an IT professional) offered to time it. They rented a clock and a computer using custom software that printed out a tape with finish times. The following spring they started renting equipment more regularly, including a computer that had Runscore installed on it.
Their next race was a 10 Mile trail run on a misty day – which sounds picturesque, but for a timing setup that’s dependent on a push-button connected to the serial port of a computer that had to be moved back and forth across the street to do data entry and print results, this was a challenge. The computer made it through the race, then promptly succumbed to the elements. That first year, they timed 10 events. Eventually growing to 140 events in their biggest year – including 40 triathlons in 5 different states – while still working full time jobs and having a daughter just starting grammar school.
Implementing Chip Timing
In 2001, John and Debbie got a chip timing system – Winning Time – eventually moving to Chronotrack hardware in 2009. The timing equipment was taking over the house, the living room, the porch, the basement and the garage. They were always able to rely on Runscore for the scoring, regardless of the event type or the hardware used. Runscore, to those who aren’t familiar, uses its own language of relatively low-level programming (meaning that it’s closer to the machine code of 0’s and 1’s), and while Debbie isn’t a programmer, she knew what she was doing.
Making the Change to RaceDay Scoring
So, why does a timing company that has used the same software for 35 years make a change to a completely different scoring platform? Simply enough – they’ve followed timing from the 3.5 inch floppy disk, to CDs, to USB, and now to the cloud. RaceDay Scoring is the next generation of timing software, so it made sense to give it a try. “RunSignup is intuitive to the industry, Now it’s at a point where we have a bunch of races on RSU, that’s how we’re easing into it.”
Initially, Bay State tried one race a year until 2024, when they jumped in with both feet. “I find RaceDay Scoring to be intuitive,” says John. The times go up to RunSignup’s results platform seamlessly, without the hiccups that Runscore has. Debbie tries to document and report Runscore errors and writes step by step guides to setting up races for their scorers.)
Next Steps for Bay State Race Services and RaceDay Scoring
The biggest challenge for the Burkes has been really understanding what RDS can do – “right now we can do a simple race, but we still need assistance for the complex stuff.” (While the author doesn’t play favorites, John and Debbie are definite favorites and do a great job of both learning on their own and making training session appointments to discuss and test things further). In Runscore, Debbie had routines to run checks and might manually change participants, but they are finding that more and more of those evaluations and adjustments can be done automatically in RaceDay Scoring – for example they have a race with a timing point unique to the shorter race and worked with the RDS training team to build a Data Action that changed participants’ event automatically if they read on that timing point during the race. This made for a results experience that accurately showed participants in the event they actually participated in before they even reached the finish line.
“We are proof you can teach an old dog new tricks,” says John. But more than learning new tricks, the Burkes are taking road-tested tricks and methodology they have developed over 35 years of timing and translating them to a new platform. The RaceDay Suite has been a great way to breathe new life into these tricks, whether it be the check mat moving participants, or replacing a clipboard and manual data manipulation with the RaceDay CheckIn app to identify early starters in a race.
(Perhaps) Training the next generation:
