Percentage drop offs

Is there anyway to import our meet results into your Rating Calculator so that it would automatically crank out a rating for all the different swims without us having to do manual entry for each individual swim? A way of automating things, in other words? One of the sheets allows calculation of up to 100 ratings at a time. The reason I limited to that number is that the calculations become unacceptably slow when you have too many rows to calculate, probably due to the over-use of lookup functions (which makes for clearer but less efficient code). I'll work on this off and on, by next fall I want to have something set up for a dual meet we have here. Another problem is unrelated to ratings: it is hard to get Meet Manager to export results in an Excel-friendly format. So a better approach may be to forego Excel altogether and write a script that works with a MM export file. That would take me a little longer to do since I am much less adept in traditional scripting languages than in Excel and MATLAB (which is the program I use to do the record fitting). Could you explain some of the features? What, for instance, are FINA points? FINA points are used in international elite swimming, it is a 1000-point scale based on this formula: P = 1000 * (B/T)^3 where B is the "base time" and T is the time that is being rated. By contrast, the VA swim rating calculator uses a 100-point scale based on this formula: R = 100 * (B/T) FINA uses the "real" overall world record as its base time while the VA calculator uses an age-dependent curve fit of world or national records in masters age groups, meaning the base time B depends on the age of the swimmer. So in my spreadsheet the FINA points is basically using the same B term as in the 100-pt scale but in the FINA formula. It doesn't give any new information -- you can calculate one rating if you know the other -- but it may be of interest to people who are used to using FINA points to assess the quality of a performance. Did you ever come up with a way to adjust for the suit change? Times done in SCY in 2010, for instance, tend to be a lot faster for many of us thanks to the pinnacle of the floatie suits. Since then, times have generally gotten slower even if the swimmers haven't necessarily become worse. This (with apologies to Leslie) seems to have affected men more than women. ' A way to do this might be to designate two years, one that is mostly free of the effects of suits and one that is not. Then you calculate record-curve coefficients for each year; this allows one to calculate a rating using one set of coefficients and then use that rating to calculate a time with the other set. In other words, you have a time conversion. A complicating factor is that records tend to get faster anyway even with no suit improvements -- by definition they can't get slower, right? -- so ideally you'd want to factor that in. If you choose two years that aren't that far apart (say, 2007 and 2010) then perhaps that factor wouldn't be too confounding and you could get a ballpark estimate. To get more accuracy one could do some sort of time-series analysis on the progression of records and explicitly model that. Or you could use Top 10 times instead of records (but possibly the effects of noise would increase). Either way that's probably more effort than I want to invest in the suit question because I don't think it would result in anything different than the answer I've come up with for myself: an effect of roughly 1 sec per 100. (Related to this: I'm at a bit of a loss on how to work in the updating of record-curve coefficients as new records are set. FINA just updates its base times every year and users must accept the fact that a given swim done in one year won't be rated the same in a later year if the world record in that event changes. I guess that's what we must do too, it just bothers me a little.)

Is there anyway to import our meet results into your Rating Calculator so that it would automatically crank out a rating for all the different swims without us having to do manual entry for each individual swim? A way of automating things, in other words? One of the sheets allows calculation of up to 100 ratings at a time. The reason I limited to that number is that the calculations become unacceptably slow when you have too many rows to calculate, probably due to the over-use of lookup functions (which makes for clearer but less efficient code). I'll work on this off and on, by next fall I want to have something set up for a dual meet we have here. Another problem is unrelated to ratings: it is hard to get Meet Manager to export results in an Excel-friendly format. So a better approach may be to forego Excel altogether and write a script that works with a MM export file. That would take me a little longer to do since I am much less adept in traditional scripting languages than in Excel and MATLAB (which is the program I use to do the record fitting). Could you explain some of the features? What, for instance, are FINA points? FINA points are used in international elite swimming, it is a 1000-point scale based on this formula: P = 1000 * (B/T)^3 where B is the "base time" and T is the time that is being rated. By contrast, the VA swim rating calculator uses a 100-point scale based on this formula: R = 100 * (B/T) FINA uses the "real" overall world record as its base time while the VA calculator uses an age-dependent curve fit of world or national records in masters age groups, meaning the base time B depends on the age of the swimmer. So in my spreadsheet the FINA points is basically using the same B term as in the 100-pt scale but in the FINA formula. It doesn't give any new information -- you can calculate one rating if you know the other -- but it may be of interest to people who are used to using FINA points to assess the quality of a performance. Did you ever come up with a way to adjust for the suit change? Times done in SCY in 2010, for instance, tend to be a lot faster for many of us thanks to the pinnacle of the floatie suits. Since then, times have generally gotten slower even if the swimmers haven't necessarily become worse. This (with apologies to Leslie) seems to have affected men more than women. ' A way to do this might be to designate two years, one that is mostly free of the effects of suits and one that is not. Then you calculate record-curve coefficients for each year; this allows one to calculate a rating using one set of coefficients and then use that rating to calculate a time with the other set. In other words, you have a time conversion. A complicating factor is that records tend to get faster anyway even with no suit improvements -- by definition they can't get slower, right? -- so ideally you'd want to factor that in. If you choose two years that aren't that far apart (say, 2007 and 2010) then perhaps that factor wouldn't be too confounding and you could get a ballpark estimate. To get more accuracy one could do some sort of time-series analysis on the progression of records and explicitly model that. Or you could use Top 10 times instead of records (but possibly the effects of noise would increase). Either way that's probably more effort than I want to invest in the suit question because I don't think it would result in anything different than the answer I've come up with for myself: an effect of roughly 1 sec per 100. (Related to this: I'm at a bit of a loss on how to work in the updating of record-curve coefficients as new records are set. FINA just updates its base times every year and users must accept the fact that a given swim done in one year won't be rated the same in a later year if the world record in that event changes. I guess that's what we must do too, it just bothers me a little.)