Awards and trophies for little athletes
Celebrating achievements and recognising club champions
At the end of the track and field season, we award trophies and medals to our most outstanding athletes at the annual general meeting and trophy day.
There are many awards offered, including athletes who:
- accumulated the most points throughout the season in each age category,
- achieved the highest number of personal bests,
- accumulated the most points from particular event categories,
- were the most coachable, and
- demonstrated the best sportsmanship.
How are our award recipients determined?
Our awards that rely on tangible results are based on a points system.
The system we use is similar to what is used at State and National multi-event competitions such as Pentathlon / Heptathlon / Decathlon. Each event scores points according to how fast they run and how far the jump and throw, not on where they placed. It’s possible for an athlete to win 4 out of 7 events in a Heptathlon, but still not win a gold medal.
At Inglewood, the points are generated by in-built formulae based on how close an athlete is to the age group centre record in that event. So in other words, points are related to the time run or distance thrown or jumped, and not place.
Why?
Let’s consider two athletes: Amy and Emily who have completed 5 events with results as per below. Even though Amy won 4 out of 5 events, Amy, in fact, won. This is because Emily wasn’t too far behind Amy in those 4 events, but had a vastly better hurdles race than Amy.
| 200m | Shot Put | 80mH | Long Jump | 800m | TOTAL POINTS | |
| Amy | 32.64 | 5.77 | 19.19 | 3.53 | 02:57.8 | |
| Points | 313 | 257 | 81 | 206 | 386 | 1243 |
| Emily | 33.57 | 5.28 | 16.61 | 3.52 | 03:09.0 | |
| Points | 262 | 226 | 268 | 204 | 286 | 1246 |
What can affect the trophy outcome?
If an athlete misses several competition days or consistently skips certain events, their points position will suffer. If an athlete always misses (for example) the walk, then they receive zero points for that event.
The greater the participation across all events, the more points.
We know this isn’t the World Championships and that illness, family commitments or life in general, can mean not all meets are attended by your athlete.
We therefore discount the poorest one or two scoring days (depending on the length of the season) from each athlete’s points tally so that athletes can have an ‘off’ week without penalty. However, if more than two weeks are missed, then the missed week is included and will add ‘Nil’ points to that athlete’s total point score.
For event category awards (for example, Intermediate Girls Sprints, Junior Boys Throws etc) where more than one age group, and therefore event record, is used in the calculation, a slight bias exists when the record in one age group is more easily achievable than in another. However, the difference isn’t generally enough to change the result, as most of our records are fairly crazy!
Questions about awards and trophies?
If you have any questions about the awards, trophies or the trophy day, please email us at admin@inglewoodlac.com.au or have a chat to one of our committee members at training.