As times have changed, so have the necessary tools that coaches use to get their job done, and MileSplit is one of those.

As the 2014 indoor season is swinging into full gear, it's time to run through the NCHSAA requirements for coaches that relate to MileSplit.  While the majority of the burden for reporting results falls on the meet director, not on the coach, there are three major things that all coaches are required to do.  NCRunners has a tutorial page for coaches that can help you through the steps for all of these

New Coaches: Register and Claim Your Team

In the MIleSplit system, every coach has his or her own individual account (there is no "team account" with information that has to be passed on from coach to coach).  Coaches then "claim" their team, and when approved they can have access to the team admin features (roster management, entering meets, etc.).  If you already have an account and have already claimed your team, then you don't have to do it again; those are one-time-only steps.  The following scenarios should answer most questions regarding these steps:

• If you are a new coach, you must register a new account and then claim your team.  Start here, and refer to the tutorial page for assistance.

• If you already have an account, but you are coaching at a different school, then simply claim your new team.

• If you are a returning coach and you claimed your team last season, you don't have to do anything for these steps!

Maintain Your Team's Roster

Every athlete has a MileSplit profile, and a team's coach can access them from the team admin page.  Coaches are responsible for maintaining the team's roster, as there is only one webmaster for the 600+ schools in our state.  Each school has only one roster (there are NOT separate entries for cross country and track, or for indoor and outdoor track - they all go on the same roster).  However, within that roster, you can designate athletes that are cross country only, track only (which covers indoor and outdoor), or both.  There are several things to keep in mind regarding team rosters, and you can refer to the Editing Your Roster tutorial for more assistance.

• Make sure your athlete's names are spelled correctly, with capital letters in the appropriate places (in other words, please do not capitalize all the letters, or leave them all lowercase).  Athlete names on MileSplit can have punctuation, like apostrophes or hyphens.

• Make sure your athletes have the correct graduation years entered.  For this school year, seniors are class of 2014, juniors are class of 2015, and so on.

• There are two ways to add new athletes: you can add them directly through the team admin screen, or you can simply wait for them to be added automatically when we get the results of your meets.

• Athletes are added as active and competing in both cross country and track by default.   You can use the checkboxes beside athlete names to add or remove groups from cross country or track, or to mark as active or inactive.

• If you have duplicate athletes on your roster, email the webmaster at the address listed on the bottom of each NCRunners page.

• If athletes contact the webmaster regarding the information that coaches are expected to maintain, they will be referred back to their coach.

Enter Your State Qualifiers

Entries for the NCHSAA Indoor State Meets must go through MileSplit Online Registration.  There are also many other meets during the winter season that use the MileSplit system for handling entries, and any coach that has successfully claimed his or her team can enter those meets.  You can find step-by-step instructions on our Entering a Meet tutorial.  Keep these things in mind regarding entries to the state meet or other meets:

• Simply having the results reported to NCRunners and seeing them in our rankings is NOT enough to get them into the state meet.  You still have to enter them in the correct meet and the correct events!

• All meets with online entries have deadlines, including the state meet.  At the deadline, the registration system closes.  If you wait until the last hour to enter a meet, that is not the fault of meet management.

• If you intend to enter both boys and girls into a meet, make sure to check both genders at the start (although there is an easy fix if you forget this step).

• You can stop at any point while entering athletes, and return later to continue.  Each time you click "done" for a particular event, all entries are saved.

More Information

• NCHSAA Indoor Track Information