First of all, we hope you are all safe and well at this strange time. Our thoughts go out to the many older officials who make athletics work, who may now be stuck indoors for some time.
We are asking all meeting organisers who take entries with our system to..
- ‘pause’ any entries which are currently open
- not open any new entries, until we have clear UKA guidance
- if you have taken entries already for March and April meetings, decide if you wish to (a) refund everyone, or (b) wait and see if rescheduling is possible for late summer
Many people feel that athletics meetings should not proceed in the next month or two. Nevertheless we know that some clubs need to be ‘told’ this from above, otherwise they will be liable for track hire etc if they cancel voluntarily.
Processing cancellations takes time, and will require careful accounting, even if the sums involved are small. We are working on the best way to automate this. This requires software development and careful testing, and will cost us time and money, especially if we get it wrong! So, please bear with us while we ensure we get it right.
In addition, in most cases the sums to be refunded will not be in your Stripe account, as they were transferred to your banks on a rolling basis. So you may need to ensure the right sums are there before we can send it back to peoples’ cards. This is not normally an issue with the odd cancellation amidst a flow of successful payments; but with everything stopping at once, it is.
If this affects you, please get in touch with us on support@opentrack.run and we will liaise until things are resolved.
Looking further ahead
Once current entries are put to bed, we are facing perhaps the first ‘pause’ ever in the constant churn of competitions. This is an ideal time for us to improve our systems. In any event, our plan was to document things well in April, and let people start playing with and learning the Competition Management System.
We hope the sport as a whole will use the time to stop, think and make things more efficient so that when we do resume, we can all deliver more athletics with less volunteer time and effort, and new skills and ideas.