FULLY AUTOMATIC TIMING - WHAT IT IS AND WHAT IT IS NOT!

FULLY AUTOMATIC TIMING - WHAT IT IS AND WHAT IT IS NOT!

This year brings some much needed changes for track & field in Mississippi.  These changes will greatly improve the quality of track & field and allow for much greater participation in our state.  The great thing about our sport is that EVERYONE can find an event in which they can participate in and that is what high school athletics are all about, PARTICIPATION!!!

This year one great change is doing away with the preliminaries in our division meets.  This will allow our division meets to be held on one day.  As you are aware of in the past we usually held field events and preliminaries on separate days from the finals or ran preliminaries in the morning and finals in the afternoon.  Now division meets can be held in one afternoon cutting down on valuable missed school time.  What is allowing us to do away with preliminaries is fully automatic timing (FAT).  FAT systems allow us to run finals against times.  Heats will be run and athletes with the four (4) fastest times out of all the heats will qualify to move on to the region meet.  Over the last several years our athletes have been running finals against times in all of our regular season meets, preliminaries have become a thing of the past!  The uncertainty of hand or semi-automatic timing would not allow us to do this.  This year the MHSAA will require all division host sites to use a FAT system.  These systems include but are not limited to Pyro-Flash Video, Eagle Eye and FinishLynx. 

What makes a system fully automatic? 

1.    The FAT timing device MUST be activated automatically by a start signal, rather than manually (e.g., like with a stopwatch or a computer key stroke).

2.    The finish time MUST also be captured digitally (picture or video) to remove any human error or delays from the equation.

3.    Most importantly, the finish line results MUST be accurate to at least 1/100th of a second.

A system MUST meet ALL of the above to be considered a fully automatic timing system!

Please Note: Timing systems such as Sprint 8 or Time Machine are not fully automatic timing systems and are not permissible for timing division meets.  Also any fully automatic timing system that is started by hand becomes a semi-automatic timing system thus becoming ineligible for timing a division meet.