Spartan Officiating:
Improvements for Scale

 
 

Spartan Race has sponsored athletes on its Pro team since 2012. In recent years Spartan has formalized a competitive Age Group division for athletes who fit in one of 6 men’s and women’s age groups between 14 - 60+.  While Age Group athletes are not eligible for prize money, podium winners receive additional medals, and eligibility for qualification into the Elite wave.  The Age Group division has become wildly popular and has also been subject to officiating since 2018, and added its own series and prizes in 2022.

While Spartan Officiating has effectively addressed rule enforcement (including using video reviews for competitive athletes) and a fair playing field, especially in light of the “newness” of obstacle racing as a sport, it is still a work in progress. With the roughly 4x increase in competitive racers due to Age Group participation, officiating systems must adapt to accommodate the influx.

The goal of this work is to improve Spartan Officiating, contributing to a better competitive race product and upholding the essential brand pillar of Spartan as a Sport. 

 

Research

Survey Data was collected from mixed respondents including Racers, volunteers, spectators, and staff. 86.8% were competitive racers with most age groups represented. 84.2% have been racing at least 3 years, and 55% for 5+ years. You can take the survey here to add your experience to the data set and help improve officiating. Stakeholder interaction and Experience Interviews were conducted via calls and event field interviews with athletes, officials, and other staff.

Survey Data

 

Opportunity

To build more consistent, scalable systems that will improve the competitive race product —

 

Minimize the referee: athlete incident ratio

  • Minimize burpees

  • Use tech-assisted and remote refereeing

  • Referee training and certification

  • Better incentivize volunteer and paid referees

  • Eliminate non-competitive athletes from competitive heats

  • Separate customer service vs. sport issues

  • Continue to refine rules of competition

  • Proactive rules education

Solutions

Below are details from just two of many proposed interventions for improvement. You can read the full report and solution details here.

One way to minimize the referee: incident ratio is by getting more trained, experienced referee “eyes” on course. To do this, elevate and incentivize the volunteer referee position by creating a tiered system as defined below. Highlights include a shorter shift for volunteer referees vs. regular volunteers, and paid “Obstacle Referee” and “Head Official” certification courses for higher responsibility/incentive tiers.

In a given weekend 5-7 trained head officials are not working at a race. To implement tech-assisted and remote refereeing, burpee footage could be streamed to remote referees from Tiers 1-3. This increases trained referee “eyes” to lower the referee: incident ratio while minimizing referee costs.

With remote refereeing, assessing and entering penalties can begin sooner, leading to more timely awards. Because burpee penalty assessment is no longer dependent on a camera change, on-site refs are free to stay out on course longer, especially deeper into the Age Group heats when failures increase and burpee pits are fuller.

More advanced tech-assisted refereeing could be made possible by establishing a partnership with Playsight. In particular the VAR Light for Video Assisted Refereeing could help with manual and potentially automated burpee counting. Eventually, a tailored algorithm could be developed to automate monitoring of obstacles as well. Connectivity at race locations with poor internet might be addressed with mobile mesh networking, for example, a partnership with RightMesh.

You can view the rest of the proposed solutions in the full report here.

Questions? Feedback? Contact me.