The first thing to note is that it does not really matter if a boy does not enter a car. It simply means that we will have blank lanes. However, omitting a child would be very unfortunate. So the first thing to do is to find out who is currently in the pack. The pack phone list may help. You may also want to talk to the den leaders to see if anybody has added or dropped since the phone list was printed.
Each child is assigned a car number. The first digit is the den number he is in, and the second digit is just a unique number within the den. The race manifest that I have in the web page does not have last names, but the real manifest should probably have last names specified.
Order the dens by rank. Put the younger kids first on the theory that they will have a shorter attention span.
There will be as many races in each set of races as there are cars. So put in the race number to the left. Look at the sample manifest carefully, and you should see the pattern as to how cars are assigned to lanes. The basic restriction is that each car runs in each lane. This is fairly easy to visually check.
The run off races are assigned in a similar fashion, except you don't know which cars are really going to be running. Thus the schedule is constructed with fake car numbers made up of the den number and F for the first place car, and S for the second place car for the den. When the race is actually run, the computer will print out which real cars will fill in for each of the fake car numbers.
The final run of the fastest 8 cars draws upon the whole pack. This part of the schedule will not need to be changed.
Once the race schedule is formed, it needs to be entered into the computer. It is very important that the computer's idea of the race schedule match what people are being told. Double check all work through here. The race.dat file is used by the computer as the race manifest. This file is very similar to what gets handed out. Lines begining with # are ignored. Lines starting with Den introduce the races for a specific den. Lines starting with Runoff introduce a set of runoff races. A line starting with Final introduces the final races. That section should not have to be modified except for the race numbers.
Again, double check your work. Also, it is a good idea to run the program (when it is compiled for keyboard control) and run through the entire race to ensure that things look right.
Last modified 27 May 2006