Setting up a competition

Setting up is everything that happens while a competition is still a draft: what it is, when it is, which leagues it runs, and how the field is divided on the day. Get this right and the rest of the event is mostly typing scores.

Create the competition

Archery → Competitions → Add Competition opens a four-step form. Nothing is saved until the last step, and you can go back and forth freely.

The Create Competition form in Velos, on step 1 of 4. A stepper across the top reads Basic Information, Event Dates, Location and Overview. Below it are a Competition Name field, a Description box, and a Match Type choice between Indoor — 10 ends × 3 arrows per round, 30 arrows — and Outdoor — 12 ends × 3 arrows per round, 36 arrows, with Outdoor selected.

Basic Information — the name, an optional description, and the Match Type. Match type is the one choice here you cannot shrug at: Indoor means 10 ends of 3 arrows per round, Outdoor means 12 ends of 3 arrows per round, and it decides the shape of every scorecard in the competition.
Event Dates — the Start Date, an optional End Date (leave it empty for a single-day event), and the registration window described below.
Location — the venue, address, city and country. Also here: whether this is an Official Event, whether it is publicly visible, and the logo printed on its documents.
Overview — everything you entered, to check before you save.

Two settings on step 3 are worth a sentence each.

Official Event marks the competition as one whose results count toward records. Leave it off for club nights and practice shoots, or the record book fills up with them.
Visibility decides whether the competition is published or kept to the people running it. A hidden competition carries a Hidden badge everywhere it appears; it works exactly the same in every other respect.

You can change all of it afterwards with Edit at the top of the competition.

The registration window

The registration window is the pair of dates on step 2 — Registration Opens and Registration Closes — and it decides when athletes can be entered. Outside it, the buttons that add entries are gone, and the competition shows Registration Closed.

Leave both empty and there is no window at all: entries are then whatever you add by hand, whenever you like. That is the normal setup for an event where the organizer builds the entry list from paper.

Two things to expect:

Closing the window does not lock the entry list. While the competition is still a draft, an organizer can keep entering athletes; the window governs everyone else.
The window is not the only thing that closes entries. Once qualification is under way, or once a league’s qualification has been finalized, entries are locked regardless of the dates. Velos says which of the two is stopping you.

Add the leagues it runs

A league is the category athletes are grouped and ranked within — Recurve Men, Compound Women — defined by equipment, gender and age, and carrying the distance and target face that category shoots. Leagues are standing definitions your federation, club or academy reuses across competitions, not something you invent per event. Some screens in Velos call them categories; it is the same thing.

Open the competition, go to the Leagues tab, and + Add League for each one it runs.

The Leagues tab of a draft competition in Velos, headed Leagues (4), listing RECURVE MEN, RECURVE WOMEN, COMPOUND MEN and COMPOUND WOMEN with columns for Distance — 70m / 122cm and 70m / 80cm (6 rings) — Registrations, Phase, all reading Pending, and Medals, all empty, with Edit and Remove on each row.

Distance and target face come from the league’s own definition, but you can override them per competition with Edit — a 70m league shot at 50m for one event stays a 70m league everywhere else.
Registrations counts the entries in that league. It is the number to look at when deciding whether a league is worth running: a league with two entries can still hold an elimination bracket, but only just.
Phase is that league’s own stage, and it is what actually decides what you can do to it. Everything is Pending until qualification starts.
Medals fills in later, as they are awarded.

Leagues can be added at any point until the competition is completed, so a late category is not a problem. Removing one is only sensible before anyone has entered it.

Who may enter which league

Velos works out which leagues an athlete may be entered in, rather than letting you put anyone anywhere. By default it matches on gender and age — standard World Archery behaviour — and the entry form simply offers the leagues that fit.

Some federations run a different rule: an athlete’s recorded bow level can be required to reach the league’s level before they may enter it. Where that is switched on, athletes appear with a level and leagues they are not yet ready for are not offered.

Divide the field into shifts

A shift is a scheduled slot during which one group of archers shoots together, sized by how many targets the venue has. A small club event is one shift; a national championship is several. Qualification and eliminations each have their own shifts.

The Shifts tab is where the field gets divided. Until you make one, it says so.

The Shifts tab of a draft competition in Velos. A summary line reads Entries 88, Assigned 0, Unassigned 88, Shifts 0. Below it a card headed Qualification Shifts with a + Add Shift button and an empty state reading No Shifts Created, with a line explaining that shifts organise athletes into shooting groups.

The summary line across the top is the one thing to keep an eye on: Unassigned is how many entered athletes still have no shift, and the Shifts tab carries that number as a warning badge until it reaches zero.

+ Add Shift creates one: a number, a name, a scheduled start, an estimated duration and a cap on how many targets it may use. Make one per shooting slot the venue can run.

Shifts can only be created once there are entries to put in them, and not at all once qualification has been finalized — Velos tells you which of the two is stopping it.

Once shifts exist, each one shows who is in it and when it runs.

The Shifts tab of a competition that has shifts. A summary line reads Entries 88, Assigned 56, Unassigned 32, Shifts 2. A card headed Qualification Shifts lists shift 1, Morning - Recurve, Pending, 25 athletes · 09:30 AM · 180 min, and shift 2, Afternoon - Compound, Pending, 31 athletes · 02:00 PM · 180 min, each with a start button and a Targets button. — Two shifts, one per discipline. The start button opens a shift; Targets opens its target board.

Filling them is a three-step climb-down from bulk to fiddly:

Assign Athletes by League takes a whole league’s athletes into one shift at once — usually how a real event is organised, one discipline per shift.
Anyone left over appears in an Unassigned athletes list, where each can be given a shift from a dropdown.
Auto-fill remaining spreads whatever is still unassigned evenly across the shifts, and shows you where each archer would land before you confirm.

Put archers on targets

Within a shift, each archer needs a target and a position on it (the A, B, C, D of a target face). Targets, on a shift’s row, opens that shift’s target board.

Produce Targets assigns the whole shift automatically, grouping archers by league so a category shoots together.
Move to Target places one archer on a specific target and position.
Swap Targets exchanges two archers.
Move Targets shifts a range of target numbers up or down — the fix for “we’re starting at butt 11, not butt 1”.
Clear All Targets empties the board so you can start again.

The board shows how many of the shift’s archers have a target and how many do not. Get this to zero before the shift starts: scoring is entered per target, so an archer without one cannot be scored.

With leagues, shifts and targets in place, the competition is ready for people. Entries covers getting them in.

Updated for v1.36.0