Needed: An official site for all NAUCC results

General
1

OK, here is my reasoning. Baseball has its sabermetricians (people who store and analyse baseball statistics), and the Chess Federation probably has a record of every game played above a certain skill level.

Well, here we are in the relative infancy of our sport, and yet we have no central website or other database (at least not that I know of) that acts as a repository of all of our NAUCC records*. There may be indivs who have lots of the data (Foss and the Cotters, for example), but I’m concerned that there is no database where anyone could look up and analyse old records. One day soon (I hope), uni’ing will be more popular. I’d hate to find that future unimetricians have no way of knowing who won what race or artistic competition. This is what happened to the statistics of the Negro Leagues, and now there are some baseball hall-of-famers with incomplete records because no one had the foresight or organization.

As it stands, there are online data for the most recent NAUCCs (but only for the last 6 or 7, I think), but these aren’t organized in a linked fashion, so no one could easily discover how John Foss (for example) did in his races from year to year or how Ryan Woessner fared in each of his skills competitions. I don’t think it would be TOO time-consuming for someone or a few of us to put these and other data into one big database. I’d be happy to help with at least some of this.

I was inspired in this by a friend of mine who wants to put all of the results of every Scrabble tournament EVER PLAYED into one huge database. He’s doing it tourney by tourney, entering the data by himself, and has done if for a third of the pre-2000 tourneys. After that date, the data was updated automatically via computer, substantially reducing his burden.

For us to pull this off, we’d need results from all of the old races and competitions. Then we’d need someone to create an updatable database (not me – I’m not quite up to that, tho I’m good at creating spreadsheets). Then we need data-entry people.

And speaking of this last group, I think we should have someone from elected each year at the NAUCC to enter that year’s info.

  • I hope my facts are correct. If I’ve overlooked anything or otherwise erred, I welcome corrections, and if you have any ideas or suggestions, I welcome them, too.
2

David,

I’ve had the same thought regarding capturing all of the old USA, Inc. event results (and, in a related thought, of UNICON results). As far as I know, the results only exist on paper up until about 1994 when Andy Cotter created a Microsoft Access application that has since been used to run the national (and later North American) championship events. I have copies (received from Andy) of all of the old databases on my other computer out in my office. I can provide the exact years some other time when I don’t have to put on SCUBA gear to walk accross the yard :slight_smile:

The results that are already in Access could be transfered to a central database fairly easily. The older results would have to be dug out and transcribed from old copies of the USA newsletter and On One Wheel. I started looking through my stack a couple of years ago to see if I could find all of the issues containing results. I recorded the answers in an Excel workbbok that is also on my other computer (see above remarks regarding SCUBA gear).

By the way, Andy Cotter already maintains a database that tracks North American and World records in the USA, Inc. and IUF, Inc. events.

Tom

3

Most of this data (if not all) already lives in Access database format. Andy Cotter probably has all of it, as he created the program. The same is true for all but one or two of the Unicons dating back to the mid-90s or earlier.

Andy may not be available for a while as he’s getting ready for the Laos tour, but I’m sure he can supply the data to whoever wants to work the queries or other setup desired for the application you have in mind.

I agree it would be quite handy. I’d love to see an easily-accessible online place to look up unicycling world records as well. Andy’s data is for USA and IUF championships, but I don’t think he has tracked the rest of the world or stuff outside those competitions.

Okay, Tom Daniels beat me to it. Yes, for many of the older USA conventions, most of the data is in the USA Newsletters, which could probably be scanned to save someone from most of that data entry. There probably isn’t much overlap.