For the Danish Club Tournament, the Danish O-clubs are classified into divisions of 4-6 teams according their performance, which is similar to normal team sports like football or ice hockey. For example, in eastern Denmark (Østkredsen), there are 6 divisions with 4 clubs each. The best clubs compete in division 1, down to division 6, where the smaller, thus weaker clubs are competing. There are rules for promotion and relegation. After each year, the best club of each division is promoted to the next higher division while the last one is relegated downwards.
The division matches are held at special O events which are organised using a well defined format defined by DOF (Danish O Federation). Normally, at every event 1-3 divisions will take part. For every division at the event, all possible matches will take place. Every division has two match days per year.
There is a well defined format for the event (”match days”).
There are 11 courses with a predefined length and degree of difficulty. Furthermore, there are 36 fixed classes and there are fixed assignments of classes to courses.
See the following examples:
Course 1 is defined as a difficult course of 8-9km. It has to be run by the classes H21A, H17-20A and H35A.
Course 5 is defined as a medium course of 4,5-5,5km. It has to be run by the classes H13-14A, H15-16B, H17-20B and H35B.
At a DCT competition, only the results by courses count. For each match between two clubs, all runners of those clubs will be filtered and sorted by times. Several rules determine the point score for this course in this match. The results of all of the 11 courses will be added and the sum is the result of the entire match.
Examples:
At course 1, 4 runners from each club count, and the points are 8,7, … 1 in order of the result. The two fastest runners of H17-20A in the overall result (not restricted to the clubs of this match) will earn 2 resp. 1 additional points. As a restriction, a maximum of 3 runners per club from H21A is allowed to count.
At course 5, the 6 fastest runners in the match get 1 point each. That means, if 6 runners of club A are faster than all runners of club B, then there is a score of 6-0 for club A. The two fastest runners of H13-14A in the overall result (not restricted to the clubs of this match) will earn 2 resp. 1 additional points. As a restriction, a maximum of 2 runners per club from H17-20B and H35B together is allowed to count.
There are different rule sets for each division possible. For divisions 1-3, the rules are by far more challenging than for divisions 4-6. A top team of division 1 must have 3 runners in nearly all of the classes, to avoid unnecessary losses. That means, those teams have 100-150 runners of all classes competing.
My solution DCT offers all functions to evaluate a DCT competition according to the rules, which is possible online during the running event. My warmest thanks go to Henrik S. Andersen (DEN), who had specified this application and who had supported my development in the best way. He is responsible for introducing and using this application at the DCT competitions.
The events have to be organised using OE2003.
A short list of the features:
- Creating classes and courses automatically
- Defining the matches automatically
- Automatic preliminary results of all matches during the event
- Automatic preliminary detailed results of all courses during the event
- All results also available in the ”offline matter”
For 2004, the software had been updated to version 10.1. There is a new function to administer classes and courses tables more comfortably.