Using Artificial Intelligence to Schedule Athletics Meets

Artificial Intelligence (AI) sometimes gets a bad press, but we’ve found it extremely useful for a variety of tasks at our athletics club. Here’s a brief overview of how we’re using it at Vale of York Athletic Community to help plan our FMC (Funetics Multi Challenge) competition on 27 June at the University of York.

Scheduling an event timetable for an athletics meeting is a complex task, but It’s even more challenging if you’ve never done it before, as we hadn’t.

Thankfully, England Athletics provides a helpful club guide including an example timetable for anyone wanting to put on an FMC meet, which covers suggested event sequencing, group sizes and timings. But our specific challenge was adapting EA’s morning timetable to an afternoon slot, with our own particular athlete numbers, group structures and facilities available.

We fed the EA guidance document and our requirements into Claude, and it produced the Master Event Timetable for our meet you can see below. A handful of revisions later — mainly adjusting buffer times and the long jump duration whilst compensating for some inconsistencies in the original document — we had a print-ready schedule in a total of fifteen minutes.

Master Event Timetable

Once we had the Master Event Timetable sorted, our next idea was to create individual Athlete Cards for each athlete as a quick reference showing where they need to be and when. Without AI, this would have been a time-consuming manual task, prone to error and not the best use of volunteer time. With AI, generating a card for every athlete grouping took less than five minutes.

We plan to print these and hand them out at registration as athletes check in on event day. We haven’t decided yet whether to give them to athletes, parents, or both. There’s is also the option of printing the information directly on bibs alongside athlete numbers.

Athlete Cards

Inspired by the Athlete Cards, we decided to see whether Claude could also produce Officials Guidance Cards for each event, drawing on the EA FMC Club Guide. We will have a lot of new officials on the day. The morning of 27 June is a training session for new officials led by Marc Ritchie from England Athletics. So we wanted a quick, event-specific reminder of each role and its responsibilities to hand out to volunteers, possibly attached to a lanyard.

The cards below are a fourth draft, produced by Claude in half an hour after a number of modifications. They need some further changes before they’re ready to use on the day, but they are nearly there. See if you can spot the errors and potential issues we may need to fix.

Officials Guidance Cards

AI isn’t perfect, but if you’re willing to work with it and review the output carefully, it’s a tremendous asset to any athletics club. Claude is like having an army of robot volunteers that frees up your human volunteers to focus on what they do best at en event: supporting nervous children and parents on the day, and bringing the kind of warmth, kindness and fairness to a competition that no algorithm can replace.

If you’re organising a similar event, the process is straightforward: gather your constraints (start time, athlete numbers, age groups, available facilities), give Claude the EA guide or any other timetable as context, and describe what’s different about your setup. It handles the timetabling surprisingly well but just needs a careful check afterwards to make sure the results are error free and meet your specific requirements. You can even ask Claude to do the checking for you.

We are using the Claude Pro plan at approximately £18 a month, but there is a free tier if you want to give it a go before you buy.