Imagine for a moment, going to a baseball game this summer and not knowing how the home team is doing because there is no scoreboard. Or what about trying to watch your alma mater on television playing in an NCAA tournament, but you do not know which team is ahead because the TV producers were not able to show the scores. Sports would be exceptionally boring without competitors and spectators knowing who is winning and how competitors rank during every moment of the game.
Given this obvious, important conclusion, we must then ask why is it still acceptable in shooting to have competitions where there is no easy-to-follow leaderboard, either on-premise or online?
USA Shooting continues to use shared Excel spreadsheets that they update by hand. Ranking athletes in their competitions is done after events are over. The Civilian Marksmanship Program, whose mission is to “promote marksmanship,” does not have a true leaderboard for its competitions, either on-premise or online. This situation is aggravated by their online result system that is not able to receive results in real time, in spite of their having invested heavily in ESTs. At the NCAA Rifle Championship this year (despite shooting on an EST system that is five times more expensive than Athena) the spectators attending the championship did not know which team won until it was announced two hours after the last shot was fired. A further serious problem occurred in that championship because the NCAA Rifle website (whose data has to be entered by hand) failed to break ties correctly and listed the wrong athletes making the Final.
The shooting sports deserve better, and Scopos is leading with a solution.
Let’s begin by establishing how result lists should be presented to maximize spectator engagement and appeal; a solution we call the, “Results List Axiom.”
The technology implementing this solution is now available for all Scopos customers, in the latest release of Orion, Athena, and Rezults, and regardless if you are shooting on paper targets or ESTs.
During competitions, Scopos systems will rank athletes and teams, automatically by their predictive scores. A “predictive score” simply means the score an athlete is expected to finish with based on their performance so far in the competition. These predictive scores can be shown both online at rezults.scopos.tech and on Athena’s spectator displays. When an event is completed, all results are ranked by their completed score using established tie breaking rules. These final results will again be displayed automatically, online and on Athena’s spectator Displays.
The shooting sports deserve real scoreboard capabilities, and now Scopos customers have the tools to establish shooting as a spectator friendly sport.
Leaderboards should be automated, live, and avaliable to spectators within the range using large screen TVs or projectors.
Results should further be automated, live, and avalialbe to spectators anywhere, through a mobile friendly website.
Result Lists will exist in one of four statuses, future, intermediate, unofficial, and official. Depending on the status Orion will rank athletes and teams in different ways.
Orion automatically determines when a competition is in the future, intermediate, or unofficial status depending on the shots fired and assigned to the athletes in the match. Only the Match Director, using Orion, can close out a match by setting the status to Official.
In a Virtual Match, the parent match and each child match maintains their own status. The status of the overall Virtual Match is determined by merging the individual match’s statuses.
During the intermediate status, athlete scores are “predicted,” which means Orion calculates the athlete’s expected score based on their performance thus far in the competition. The Match Director will be able to choose from multiple algorithms to predict athlete scores, or choose not to predict scores at all.
The most well known predictor of scores algorithm is using the athletes average shot fired. For example, in a 60 shot standing match, say an athlete fires a 97.5 in their first ten shots. Using average shot fired, Orion will predict that they will finish with a 585.0. A second athlete may be shooting faster and shot a 192.0 in their first 20 shots. This second athlete though would be ranked behind the first athlete, because their predicted score is only 576.0.
Other predictive score algorithms will be announced soon.
Every 20 seconds, while the competition is ongoing, Orion will re-predict scores from each athlete and publish the intermediate result list online, as well as displaying it on the Spectator Display (if used).
Most ties within the intermediate result lists will not be broken. This is because it's often impossible to do so. Either because athletes have just started shooting, or because athletes shoot at different paces. Instead, athletes with ties are given the same rank during intermediate results.
Score predictions work for both paper targets and ESTs. ESTs including Athena, as well as customers using the MegaLink to Orion or Sius to Orion interfaces.
Tie breaking rules are defined in the Reconfigurable Rulebook Ranking Rule definition files. The values and columns displayed in a result list, either online, printed, or on a Spectator Display, are defined in the Reconfigurable Rulebook Result List Format definition files. Result Lists are stylized using CSS classes.
