How to Create a High Point Award

High point awards are a unique and fun way to celebrate athletes and teams of all skill levels at once. They can also be used to recognize coaches based of student athlete performance. And, they can be an effective way to motivate attendees to enter more disciplines.

For individual high point awards, athletes compete to see who can win the highest number of placement points across all individual disciplines for their age category, all levels combined.

For team high point awards, groups or studios compete against each other to see who can win the highest number of placement points across all team disciplines. There is usually just one division for all ages, skill levels, and sizes.

For coach high point awards, coaches are ranked based on the combined total placement points of all students competing in individual disciplines at the contest.

Contest directors may choose how many places will receive points in each discipline, and how many points. They can also award "base points" to individuals, teams, and coaches for entering each discipline. Any placement points an athlete, team, or coach receives is then added on top of the base points for that discipline.

Here is a step-by-step guide for creating a high point award for your contest.

In the event admin, navigate to the "High Points" page under the Catalog section (top left of the menu). Click "Create New".

Give your high point a name, such as "Individual Hight Point Award" or "Group High Point Award". Do not add any age division-specific information, as that will be added in the next step.

Select a type. Athlete high point awards will comprise only individual events (e.g., open, in-state, visitor, title events, and all-around/pageant events), broken down by age divisions of your choosing. Group high point awards will include only team events, combined into one division for all ages, levels, and team sizes. Coach high point awards will comprise only individual events, with one "division" for all coaches.

Optionally, add a description to explain how many places/points contestants will receive for each discipline. For example, if you want to award points for the top five finishers in each discipline you might say:

The top five finishers in each discipline will receive points: 1st place - 5 points, 2nd place - 4 points, 3rd place - 3 points, 4th place - 2 points, 5th place - 1 point.

Lastly, enter the minimum place for which you will award points. Keeping with the example above, you would enter 5. This will automatically produce the "rules" Twirlmate needs to know in order to tabulate the high points for each discipline.

Click create to save the high point.

At the top of the next page, if you're creating an athlete high point, will have the ability to select age divisions. Coach and group high point awards only have one division, which cannot be changed.

To create an age division, click "Add Division", select from the provided list of age divisions, and click Save. Repeat this process until you have select all the age divisions you want to use.

The next section, Rules, contains the tabulation rules Twirlmate will use to apply placement points for each discipline. If you want to add more placements, click "Add Rule" to do so. Enter the place and points. Places must be greater than or equal to one, and must be unique per each high point (e.g., there cannot be 2 rules for 1st place). Points must be greater than zero, but may use decimals (e.g., 0.5, 1.5, etc).

Finally, at the bottom of the page, select the disciplines you want to include for this high point. Click "Add Discipline". Select a discipline and enter how many base points you will award each contestant just for entering. If you do not want to offer base points, enter 0. Each discipline can only be added to a high point once. Base points must be greater than or equal to zero.

So far, you've created a high point structure that can be reused from one year to another. Next, you must create the high point divisions for the current year of your contest. To do so, visit the "High Points" page under the {year} Results section of the navigation (near the bottom).

Click generate high points. Twirlmate will then create the necessary divisions, based on your defined structure and the disciplines contestants have entered for this year. If no 0-6 year-old contestants exist for this year, there will be no 0-6 individual high point division.

If more contestants register after you've already generated high point divisions for this year, you may click generate high points again as many times as you like to "refresh" the divisions.

Now that you've created the high point divisions for this year, it's time to populate them with contestants. To do so, click the name of a division on the {year} High Points list page.

Click generate contestants. This will find all athletes, teams, or coaches competing in that high point's age division, along with the disciplines/students that will count towards their high point total.

Note: for coach high points, a coach must have a Twirlmate account and be connected to an athlete as a coach in order to be included.

Next, to determine your high point winner, click place contestants. You may choose to do this once at the end of the contest after all results are in. Or you can do it repeatedly throughout the day and watch the results change.

To view a more detailed explanation of how Twirlmate calculated the high points for a given contestant, click view details in their row.

Finally, you may publish high point updates or results in the attendee portal by clicking Print and Publish in the upper right corner of the page. Until you publish a high point's results, attendees will not be able to see the outcomes for that division.

Clicking Print and Publish will take you to a new page where you can publish the results, as well as print them. You do not have to publish results in order to print them.

Congratulations, you've successfully created and tabulated a high point award using Twirlmate!