Create Race Divisions (Age Groups)

Modified on 07 April

Race Divisions

RunSignup offers a simple Race Division capability. It allows a race director to set any number of different categories and mark them by age and gender, as well as set the number of finishers displayed in each division. 


You can manually or automatically have participants placed into Divisions. We'll go over how participants are automatically placed in this guide. 


When participants register, their Age is calculated based on the date of birth entered, and the Age Calculation Date set for each Event in the Race Wizard. Based on this Age and Gender provided a participant is placed into the most appropriate Division for them, based on how you have configured your Division Setup. 


Divisions have a Priority, so that a Participant will be placed in the single Division that is highest in the list of Divisions added. For instance, you would want to have your Overall Divisions above your Age Group Divisions if you would like your top finishers to not be placed in their Age Group Divisions as well. 


If you would like to allow double-dipping, meaning that a participant can place in multiple Divisions at once, you can use the Allow the winner of a higher priority division to win this division. option on your lower priority Division. For instance, if you have an Overall band and an Age Group band you can check this setting on the Age Group band to allow a single participant to place in both the Overall Division and the Age Group Division.


A Note for Timers

Divisions should not be set up if you or your timer are using RunScore or The Race Director to upload results directly to RunSignup, as both of these software packages will automatically generate these bands when publishing results.


This is only used in Results display, so you will not find these bands in your reports on your Dashboard. They will only show on the front end when a participant is looking at the Results page.


When times are uploaded for a participant, since we know their age and gender from registration, we can calculate which division they belong in.


Getting Started

Start by navigating to RaceDay Tools > Race Divisions > Race Divisions then clicking the Edit Divisions button.

Then you’ll need to set the Event Date, which Event you are creating Divisions for, and whether you want your Division placements calculated by Clock/gun time, or by Chip time.



Overall Division

Next you're given the option to set an "Overall Division". Be careful with this setting. This will take out the top X finishers, regardless of Gender. 


If you would like to create Divisions for Top 3 Male and Top 3 Female, you should save this field as "0" and set up Custom Divisions for these two divisions as explained below.


Custom Divisions

In RunSignup all Divisions are "Custom Divisions". In order to create a top finisher category, age group, or any other type of Division you'll need to create a new Custom Division, then define its settings to make it act like an Overall Top Finisher Band, or an Age Group Band. 


Most of the time, you'll want to add some Overall Top Finisher type Divisions first, then use the Quick Age Group Setup button to add in Age Group type Divisions below your Overall and/or Masters Divisions.


To add a new Custom Division, click the green Add Race Division button.


Overall Top Finisher Divisions


Below you'll find an example of how to configure a simple set of Top 3 Overall Male/Female Divisions. See how the Participants should be automatically placed in this division based on gender option is checked? This is what will filter out participants based on their Gender to place them in this Division.

 

You'll also notice that I've entered 3 into the Number to Show in Results field. This will determine how many participants to place in this Division.


Once we have our top level divisions set up, we can move on to setting up specific Age Group Divisions.


Divisions for Age Groups Using Quick Age Group Setup


You can create Age Group type Divisions one by one and configure them manually, or you can use the Quick Age Groups Setup button to create ranges of Custom Divisions with settings per-defined to be used as Age Group type Divisions.


Age Groups will allow us to create bands of males and females based on the age parameters that we provide. There are 4 values that we need to set, and it is important to understand how they work.

The Ages Group Size setting lets us define how "wide" of a band we are making.So if your race is using 5 year age groups, you would want to set the Age Group Size to 5.


The Starting Age should be set to the age at which your age ranges begin.In this case we want our age groups to start with 15-19, so the first 5 year age group should start at 15. 


The Ending Age should be set to the last age that you would like to include in age groups.For this example we will use 79.

The Number to Show in Results is generally set to how deep you plan on presenting awards to in each category.


Once you have all of your settings select the Add Age Groups button and you’ll now have age bands created for M15-19. M20-24, M25-29, M30-34, M35-39, M40-44, M45-49, M50-54, M55-59, M60-64, M65-69, M70-74, M75-79, as well as each respective female age band.


Editing and TroubleShooting Division Placements


If you have added divisions after uploading results or have made changes to your divisions for your race, you may need to recompute the divisions to get these to show correctly on the results page. This can be done by going to RaceDay Tools >> Results >> Edit Results >> Recompute Division Placements.