If an event includes at least two stages (e.g., heats and final), you can use the advancement feature to set automatic qualification.


This guide is divided into four sections: 


General information


If your competition includes qualifying rounds (e.g., heats, semi-finals for running events, and qualifications for field events), you will see an extra column in the results called Adv.


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This option allows you to select athletes who qualify for the next round.

  • Q - means qualify by place finish in track events or qualify by meeting the standard in field events.
  • q - means qualify by time in track events or qualify without meeting the standard in field events.
  • qR - means qualify for the next round by the referee.
  • qJ - means qualify for the next round by the Jury of Appeal.
  • qD - means qualify for the next round by Draw.


Suppose you set advancement rules in the Schedule settings (for more information, see the Set schedule guide). In this case, the Q and q marks will appear automatically when the Calculate advancements option is enabled in the Automatic calculation menu.



Enabling or disabling the automatic calculations applies to all groups of a given event stage (including the summary group).


You can use the promotion option to generate start lists for a higher stage. To do this, click on the Add Q/q button. This option is available in both start lists and results views.


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The list of promoted athletes is taken from the lower stage of the summary group and includes all set records. 


If the start list for the round to which you are adding promoted athletes already includes other athletes (e.g., athletes not starting in the preliminary round), they will remain on the list.


Athletes marked as out-of-competition (OOC) will not be included in auto advancement; you can still advance them by selecting qR, qJ, or qD manually.



Setting up and using automatic qualification Q/q for running events


  1. In the Schedule, for a given running event, set your stages (Preliminary, Heat, Semi Final, Final) and number of groups per stage (please note that you can also change the number of groups and set advancement rules during start list Seeding). In the given example, there are 2 stages (Heats and Final), 2 groups of Heats, and a single Final. You can always change this by using the + symbol on the right-hand side of the Summary group for the event.



  1. Next, select your automatic qualification criteria under Set up in the Adv. column. You will now see the box appear with Top Q places per heat (Q) and Additional q fastest across heats (q). The Q designates how many qualifiers automatically move to the next round per heat. The q parameter indicates how many of the remaining combined finishers advance to the next round. In this example, Q = 2, q = 2, which means the top 2 finishers in each heat will move to the finals, and the next top 2 from the combined heat results will also move to the finals. Thus, there will be 6 athletes in the final.



  1. Next, go to the start list and add your athletes (see the Create start lists guide for adding athletes, or the Add athletes from a CSV file guide for loading athletes from a file) if they are not yet loaded. Once they are loaded, hit the Seed button.



  1. Once in the seeding view, seed according to your preferences (see the Seeding and lane/order assignment methods guide for more details). The seeding in the current example is shown below:



  1. Go to the Results page and make sure Automatic calculations of places and advancements are enabled. Once results have been entered (either through the fully automatic timing system, Roster web admin platform or Roster Meet Mgmt app), you will see the following (Heat - Group 1 shown):


Places and Qs are added automatically.


After entering all results, mark them as FINISHED and hit Save. This is necessary to ensure this group is finalised and the results are properly calculated between groups.



Once results for all individual groups are ready and marked as finished, go to the event Summary to now view all qualifiers, both Q and q. You will find the 4 Qs (2 from each heat), then the next 2 small q (from the combined heats).



  1. Now you are ready for the next stage. In this case, the next stage is the Final, so if you go to the Final start list by clicking on the left-hand side, you will see the following:



Select the Add Q/q option on the upper right-hand side, and now you will see all the athletes who have qualified for the Final from the previous heats. Make sure you hit the Save button to save this start list.


Please note that you can still manually change this start list when necessary.



  1. Now that your Final start list is set, go ahead and take a look at the seed options by selecting the Seed button on the upper right-hand side. Once in seeding, note that you can select the Seeding basis as the previous Qualifying result. Make sure you hit the Save button once you are done choosing all your seeding and lane assignment options.



Any change to the previous round's results after athletes have been added to the start list of a higher round will not automatically update the Qualifying results. To update the results, remove the athlete with the changed result from the start list for the higher stage, then use the Add Q/q option again.


Setting up and using automatic qualification Q/q for field events


The process for setting up automatic qualification in field events is essentially the same as that above for running events. The only difference is in setting up the Advancement rules in the Schedule or Seeding. After setting up your qualifying rounds, press the Set up button under the Adv. column. For field events, you will see the following Advancement rules:



The two fields for automatic advancement rules are: Qualifying performance and Total advanced participants.


  • Qualifying performance: this is the min. standard that athletes need to meet to automatically advance to the next round.

  • Total advanced participants: The number of athletes who will move on to the next round.

    • If the number of athletes meeting the Qualifying performance standard is greater than the number of Total advanced participants set, then ALL the athletes meeting the mark will move onto the next round, regardless of the number.

    • If the number of athletes reaching the Qualifying performance is fewer than the Total advanced participants, the next-best performances will qualify regardless of meeting the standard, so that the Total advanced participants number is met for the next round.


You can also select Qualification in the Event model field. Read more about models in the Set schedule guide.



Adding qR, qJ and qD


If an athlete advanced to the next round by Referee (qR), Jury of Appeal (qJ) or Draw (qD), you can manually select the correct status from the Adv. column. You can do this at any time, regardless of the athlete's status or auto-advancement calculation setting.




Special case: Resolving ties with automatic qualification


There are 2 cases of ties to consider when using automatic qualification:


  1. The number of big Q qualifiers with ties is more than the number set under Advancement rules. The default resolution is that all big Q qualifiers will move on, and the number of small q qualifiers will reduce by the same number. Thus, the total number of big Q plus q qualifiers remains the same. In the example above, big Q = 2 and small q = 4. With 2 heats, this means that there are 2 big Q qualifies from each heat and the next best 4 times qualify as little q. If the result happened to have a tie for the big Q finishes (as an example here, let’s say there is one tie), then there will be 3 big Q qualifiers for that heat with a total of 5 combined big Q’s. This then means there will only now be 3 small q’s as a result of reducing the number of small q by 1 to keep the total number of qualifiers the same.

  2. The number of all big Q qualifiers, including ties or tied last small q qualifiers are more than the total number set under Advancement rules. The default is that ALL qualifiers will move to the next round, even if the total exceeds the originally specified limit. This allows the organizer/organiser to determine how they wish to handle the ties. The organizer/organiser may wish to:

    1. Allow all qualifiers, including ties, to move on if enough lanes can support all of them (default in Roster).

    2. Draw lots to determine the outcome of the tie and manually remove the appropriate “unqualified” athlete from qualification by setting a - in the Adv. column for that athlete.

    3. Re-run the event with just the ties to determine the outcome and manually qualify the appropriate athlete.


At any point, the organizer/organiser can manually change the advancement result by disabling the automatic calculation of advancements and choosing the appropriate action (-, Q, q) for each athlete under the Adv. column in the Results Summary for that event.




Special case: Changing advancement rules AFTER entering results


If you want to change the qualification rules after having added results, each change in the advancement rules will apply automatically after saving. However, it will not change the start list of the next stage if you have already used the Add Q/q option to add qualifiers into the next stage.