At your Club, are you heading towards hosting a large Championship soon?

Obviously when you’re headed towards hosting a Worlds as we were, you start thinking about the BIG questions a year or two ahead. You’ll know already that Datchet tried to always have at least two ways to do any single job at the Worlds. Does this approach apply to Scoring?? … Hell, YES !

What are the really big questions to consider in Scoring? Well, for a start you have 84 people about to arrive who have spent a lot of money to come and race with you for a week. At the end of the week, or at the end of the Championship, regardless of the week they had, they ALL want to see their name on that Results Listing.

Yes – On that last day, 84 “experts” will all gaze at the beautiful printout that you have pinned to the Official Notice Board. They expect two things –

• it’ll look smart and professional and their name was correctly spelled
• It will have precisely ZERO errors on it. If they find an error at that point, especially in their own score, your name will be MUD. The subject of clean results, as it happens, is a whole new thing if you Parallel Score.

Reputation Protection – The Big Issue:-

Selfishly, for your Club you should be thinking of protecting the Club’s Reputation. It takes years to build up a reputation to be considered anywhere near “capable”. As we all know from 2025, you can destroy Club reputation in a flash. Reputation takes years to build and just minutes to destroy. If Scoring were the perceived failure point, it’ll take less than a few minutes to destroy. It’ll be talked about (with sniggers) in Club bars across the world for years.

Within Scoring, everyone will tell you “it’ll never go wrong”. …. “one in a thousand chance…” etc.

Don’t you believe it. What would you do to protect your Club Reputation?

In considering Parallel Scoring, we would consider it :-

• for a 30 Boat Event? …. Probably, No
• For a 45-55 Boat event? … Well maybe
• For a 55-84 boat event?… Yes, for sure.

A simple way to think about it? If the scorer or scoring system fell over on the Penultimate Day, could the Championship recover by some other means – even paper scoring?? If you have already entered a couple of thousand boat results, just think what it means.

In 2024, we made the decision to score our various upcoming Championships into two separate scoring systems at once. We called the technique, “Parallel Scoring”.

Not simply having hot standby laptops and USB sticks…. but two systems at once.

Does this mean double the work? NO.

Are there surprising benefits? YES!!

Which two scoring systems? Everyone wants to know. Regardless of if you’re racing to HMS Rules or SHRS Rules, you should first think of what volunteer skills and platforms you can access locally. Start there.

At our Club we had people with knowledge of three scoring systems for heat based racing – the MYA’s HMS Excel, HMS on AFleet and HMS on Andrew Crocker’s brilliant Fleetboard. These are three really good scoring systems. We were spoilt for choice. We shall write more on the website later about why we chose what did …and probably it will not be for the reasons you expect. …Start with the volunteers you can get and the scoring skills that they have.

Consider the technology skills you might need too – I was keen to have a team member who is a Microsoft Professional for a living. How fantastic that turned out to be.

When you choose both your scoring systems, remember that if the two systems do not run on entirely separate technologies…. there is really no point.

When you later read our analysis of the things that can/did go wrong, you’ll fully appreciate the depth of the issue and separate tech.

We felt it natural to choose HMS Excel as our primary system and then Afleet as our Parallel System.

We decided with the PRO that unless we had a catastrophic situation, official results would simply always be from our primary platform – HMS Excel 2022.