meshO Manager

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Drawing start times ​

Audience: Event organisers allocating individual start times to competitors.

The start draw is Manager's tool for turning a list of competitors into a start list — assigning each competitor a start time, spaced at a regular interval, in a randomised order. It lives in the Starts section and produces each competitor's individual allocated start time.

This page covers how the draw is organised, how to configure it, how to run it, and how to fine-tune the result afterwards.

Note: The draw assigns individual start times. These sit at the top of the start time hierarchy, so a drawn start time overrides any class or event mass start for that competitor. If your event uses a single mass start instead of individual starts, you don't need the draw at all — set the mass start on the event or class and skip this page.

Where the start draw lives ​

Navigate to Starts in the side menu. The page has two tabs along the top:

  • Start list — the read-only, printable start list. This is what you publish and hand out. It shows the start times the draw has produced, grouped and sorted however you like, with PDF, IOF XML, and print options. See the Start list tab below.
  • Manage starts — the draw tool itself. This is where you produce the start times that the Start list tab displays.

The rest of this page is about the Manage starts tab.

The core idea: lanes ​

The draw is organised into lanes. A lane is one course, and one course is one lane — the two are the same thing. Each lane is a single timeline of start slots, stepping from a first-start time by a fixed interval.

A few consequences follow from this:

  • Classes that share a course share a lane. They're laid out one after another as contiguous blocks down the lane's single timeline. You choose the order the blocks appear in.
  • No two competitors on the same course can get the same start time. Because each lane is one strictly increasing timeline, clashes on a course are impossible by construction — you don't have to check for them.
  • Each lane has its own settings. Interval, first start, and gap rules can all be set per lane, falling back to event-wide defaults when you leave them blank.

In the draw grid, lanes are the columns and time runs down the rows.

Running a draw — the short version ​

  1. Open Starts → Manage starts.
  2. Click Draw starts (top right).
  3. Set the interval and first start under Event settings, and adjust any lane that needs different settings.
  4. Click Allocate start times.
  5. Review the result on the order screen, and drag individual competitors around if you need to.

That's the whole loop. The sections below explain each step in detail.

Step 1: Open the draw ​

The Manage starts tab opens on the order screen — the view of allocated start times. Until you've run a draw, it's empty and prompts you to click Draw starts.

If you haven't assigned courses to classes or added competitors yet, the screen tells you so. The draw needs classes with courses and competitors in those classes before it has anything to lay out.

Step 2: Configure the draw ​

Click Draw starts (top right) to open the configure screen.

Warning: If start times have already been allocated, Draw starts becomes Re-draw starts and asks you to confirm first. Re-drawing reconfigures and re-allocates from scratch, which replaces the current start times and ordering — including any manual reordering you did. There's no undo.

The configure screen shows a live preview of the plan: the lanes laid out as columns, time down the rows, with each class's block of slots labelled by class short name and position. No real competitors appear yet — the preview is purely structural, so you can see the shape of the draw before committing to it. A summary line above the grid reports the competitor, class, lane, and gap counts, plus the first and last start time.

Event settings ​

Click Event settings to open the event-wide configuration. The dialog has two tabs: Settings and Classes.

Settings ​

The Settings tab holds the values every lane inherits unless it overrides them:

  • Draw algorithm — how competitors are ordered within each class. See Draw algorithms below.
  • First start — the time the earliest slot in each lane sits at.
  • Interval — the gap between consecutive start slots. Must be greater than 00:00 — you can't allocate until it is.
  • Reserve a gap every N starters — leaves one empty slot after every N runners (e.g. set to 15 to keep a free slot every 15 starters for late entries or vacancies). Set to 0 for no reserved gaps.
  • Gap between classes — the number of empty slots inserted between one class's block and the next, down a shared lane. Set to 0 to butt the blocks together.

Classes ​

The Classes tab lists every class in the event, each with an Included / Excluded toggle. By default every class is included in the draw — switch a class off to exclude it.

Excluding a class leaves it out of the draw entirely: it doesn't appear in the configure-screen preview, and Allocate start times skips it, so its competitors get no drawn start time. Use this for classes you're handling separately — for example a class running a mass start, or one whose start times you're entering by hand.

Note: Exclusion only affects drawing starts — it never deletes start times that are already allocated. If a class already has allocated starts (for instance because you excluded it after a draw), its competitors still appear on the order screen and in the start list. The exclusion simply keeps the class out of the next draw.

Tip — redrawing only some classes: Because a re-draw only touches included classes and leaves excluded classes' existing times untouched, you can use exclusion to redraw a single class (or a selected few) without disturbing the rest. Exclude every class you want to leave as it is, leave only the class(es) you want to redraw included, then run Allocate start times again — only the included classes are redrawn, and everyone else keeps their current times. This works most cleanly for a class on its own course; if the redrawn class shares a lane with classes you kept, it's laid out from the lane's first start independently of them, so you may need to fine-tune on the order screen to avoid overlaps.

Per-lane settings ​

Each lane (course) can override the event defaults. Click the cog on a lane's column header to open its settings.

  • First start, Interval, Reserve every N, Gap between classes — leave any field blank to inherit the event default; fill it in to override just that lane. A lane that starts late, or runs at a 3-minute interval while the rest run at 2, is set up here.

When a lane carries more than one class, the dialog gains a Classes tab:

  • Drag to reorder the classes — this sets the order their blocks appear down the lane.
  • Earliest start per class — holds a class until a given time. The class's block won't begin before this time even if earlier slots in the lane are free; it snaps up to the next available slot at or after the floor. Leave blank for no floor.

Reordering lanes ​

Drag a lane's column header sideways onto another to change the left-to-right order of the lanes. This is purely presentational — it doesn't change any times — but it's handy for grouping related courses/classes together on screen and in the start list.

Step 3: Allocate ​

When the preview looks right, click Allocate start times and confirm.

Allocation writes a start time onto every competitor in the draw, replacing any start times already allocated. The order within each class is decided by the chosen draw algorithm. Manager then switches to the order screen so you can review and adjust.

Note: Allocation only ever touches competitors who are in scope — those in a class that has a course. If nothing gets allocated, it's almost always because classes have no courses assigned, or there are no competitors yet.

Step 4: Review and fine-tune ​

The order screen shows the allocated start list as a grid: lanes across, time down, with each competitor in their slot (bib, name, and class).

Moving a competitor ​

Drag a competitor onto a different slot in the same lane. The other competitors ripple to keep the course clash-free:

  • Moving a competitor into an occupied slot rotates the displaced competitors along to fill the gap your competitor left.
  • If you drop onto an empty (reserved) gap, the competitor simply takes it.

You can only move a competitor within their own lane — a competitor's course doesn't change just because you're reshuffling start times. Drops onto another lane are ignored, and the competitor snaps back.

Double-click a competitor to open their Edit competitor dialog.

Clashes ​

If two or more competitors end up at the same time on the same course — which can happen if you edit start times elsewhere, not from a normal drag — the slot is highlighted red with a warning icon. Resolve it by dragging one of them to a free slot.

Showing more slots ​

The grid shows the range from the first allocated start to the last. To make room beyond that:

  • Add earlier slots / Add later slots extend the visible window so you can drag a competitor into a brand-new slot before the first or after the last start.
  • Reset extra slots collapses the window back to the allocated range.

These buttons only change what's visible — dragging a competitor into an added slot is what actually gives them that time.

Changing a lane's interval here ​

The cog on a lane header is still available on the order screen, trimmed to just the lane's interval. Changing it re-steps that lane's grid without re-running the whole draw.

Draw algorithms ​

The algorithm decides the order competitors within a class are placed onto the class's slots. All three randomise, so re-running produces a different draw each time.

  • Random — every competitor in the class is shuffled together, ignoring club. The simplest, fairest-by-default option.
  • Separate club members — spreads members of the same club as far apart as possible, so clubmates don't start back-to-back. Same-club neighbours only occur when one club is so large that separation is arithmetically impossible.
  • Cluster club members — the opposite: members of a club start as one unbroken block. Useful when a club wants its runners out together.

Competitors with no club are treated as individuals — neither clustered with, nor deliberately separated from, one another.

How settings combine ​

Most settings can be set at more than one level. The most specific value wins, and a blank value inherits from the level above:

  • Interval and First start cascade lane → event. (They're per-lane because a lane is a single uniform timeline.)
  • Reserve every N and Gap between classes cascade class → lane → event.
  • Earliest start is a class-only setting — it snaps the class's block up to the next slot at or after the floor.

So you can set a sensible event-wide interval once, then override just the two lanes that need something different, then hold back just the one class that mustn't start before 11:00 — without repeating yourself.

Changes write live ​

There's no draft mode and no separate save step. Configuration changes persist as you make them, and moves on the order screen are written immediately. There's no undo, so when re-drawing would discard manual reordering, Manager warns you first.

The Start list tab ​

Once start times are allocated, the Start list tab is what you publish. It's a read-only view with an options panel on the right:

  • Group by — Class, Course, or a single combined list.
  • Order by — Start time, surname, or first name.
  • Display — toggle a start-time-over-time graph, and per-class and per-course summary tables (showing first start, last start, and how many competitors have a start time).
  • Print columns — one or two columns, for denser printouts.
  • No start time — include competitors without an allocated time, optionally in their own separate table.

Use the Publish menu (top right) to Export IOF XML, Export PDF, or open a Print view. The PDF and print output mirror the on-screen grouping, sort order, and summary tables.