In this chapter, we will be running through the procedures to run a test rodeo. We strongly recommend that new associations run a test rodeo prior to the beginning of their rodeo season. This test rodeo is useful for becoming familiar with the system and also as a means to test the outputs. It's far better to discover that something is not set properly, such as payout split formulas, during a test rodeo than on a live rodeo weekend. When running the test rodeo, please remember that the system is live, which is why we recommend that you either use fake members in the test or use members whose emails will go to the person or people who are running the test rodeo. If needed, you can add numerous fake members with the same email address. Also, if you are taking online payments for membership and or rodeo entries, the payment system is live. The best time to run your test rodeo is after you have worked through our admin user guide and have all your settings in place. This will be a test of your settings as well as a test of the software. Remember that anything that is not working or seems to produce incorrect results is likely a result of incorrect settings and the support people at Rodeo Producer can provide you assistance to make it right.
This steps we will follow are as follows below. You can use as your own checklist.
This test rodeo will test the system from end to end, including new members, adding a rodeo, rodeo entries, editing entries, stock, generating draws, displaying rodeo information on the member side, using the various rodeo tools or rodeo sheets, entering some scores and times, and generating payouts and points calculations, reviewing results, and viewing standings. All right, let's get started. The first thing you should do is add some new members. We recommend between 10 and 20. More is better because it gives you a little more flexibility, but you can you can get away with 10. We suggest you do this from both the public side and from the admin side. From the admin side, you can go to Members > Set Members, and add some new members into your member database.
Use the Add a Member button or use the Bulk Add Member button. Before you do that, if you wish to really isolate these members from the rest of the system, you can set up a new member type, a test member type, and you can use that to exclude your test members from standings, to again isolate them from your season. We can also exclude the test rodeo from the season. We also suggest that you add some members from the member side which you can get to with Start Menu > Go To Member View and then complete the form as if you are a member. This will give you some practical experience with what members will see which will help you support them down the road.
We will not go into deep detail about every single step but we do want to make sure we take you through the steps to do this test rodeo. Next we are going to add a new rodeo. So we'll go to Rodeo Setup > Set Rodeos. Click to add a new rodeo to the schedule and we will call this the the October test rodeo and we will give it a location. Make sure it is assigned to the current season. Set your start date. We're going to set this as October 4th. Make sure your entry open date is at least current as of right now and ends sometime in the future, leave enough time to do your testing, a few days. when you are creating your test rodeo, you will want to make sure that you are using settings that you would use most often, including the rodeo format settings. So, if you would normally have a two-day rodeo, we would want to set those dates accordingly. If it's normally a one-day rodeo, as we have here, then you would set up that way.
We will ensure to leave the draw and results settings as unchecked. We will use these settings later as well as the exclude from rodeo counts and exclude from standings. We will slide by the rest of these settings as they don't pertain to this test rodeo. This is a standard rodeo. We will need to ensure that performance one is set to the right date and a reasonable starting time.
We can skip past the multi-go formats. And now we are into the events. We do recommend that you limit the number of events in your test rodeo. What we suggest is a timed event, a team event, and a rough stock event.
You will want to set the stock contractor. We are selecting one that we know has a number of Bareback animals in the database. Just as a test, you can put in a note to competitors. Then we save the settings.
We see we have our October test rodeo in the table. We have it all set up to go.
We have our three events in place and now the next step is to add a number of entries. We would suggest adding entries in two ways. One is under rodeo setup rodeo entry by admin. This will allow you to enter groups of entries at a time and uh we'll speed up the process a bit. We would also suggest that under Rodeo Setup > Set Entries there is a way to manually enter members one event at a time and do that just to test the process as well. We suggest you add at least 5 entries per event and at least 10 entries in one of the events. You will notice when the entry is submitted there are options to pay your fees online. We want to make sure you understand that if you have your Stripe account set up, your payment system is live online. So you probably don't want to process these payments. Just leave these member entries as unpaid so you don't have to deal with refunding dollars.
We're going to go to Rodeo Setup > Set Entries. We will select the October Test rodeo and we'll see the entries that we've just added. We'll go offline and skip ahead to when we have all of these entries in place. [...]
Okay, we're back. As you can see, we have a number of entries in here. Senior Barrel Racing, Open Team Roping, and Bareback.
We have enough entries to allow the draw to show some randomness and to enter in some results and calculate some results. So, we have what we need here. So, we are currently in the set entrants page and what we want to do is test a couple of the features. We are going to go down to Bareback entries and we're going to edit one of the entries. In this example, during the entry process, our lead member entered the wrong member number. We're going to fix. Click on the member name for member number 108. Change the member number from the list to 110. Click Submit.
When we scroll down to Bareback now, we will see this member 110 has replaced 108.
Next we are also going to set up the stock. Now in this case we already have stock in our demo account here. We would suggest that you add enough stock to the stock event that you have set up so that you can run a stock draw. In this account we have our stock in place already. If you need to review how to set up stock, we recommend going to the chapter on how to set up the stock database.
We have all our entries in place and we have stock in the stock database. We are going to use one of our tools here, which is the Rodeo Setup > Rodeo Pre-Draw Count. Choose the October Test rodeo. We're going to see that for Bareback, we have a count of 11 entries. We know that when we select stock for the draw, we'll need at least 11 animals plus one more for re-ride stock. We'll go to Rodeo Setup > Set Stock for Draw. We'll scroll to the Bareback portion of the list. We'll make sure we're using the Pinehill Stock Company stock contractor animals. Select 11 animals. We know that we'll need to set a re-ride stock as well. So, we'll just make note of Rainman at this time, that's what we're going to use for our re-ride. So, we'll save our stock selections.
We may as well set the re-ride right now. It doesn't really matter whether we set that re-ride stock at this time or if we set it later. We're going to choose Rodeo Setup > Set Re-Ride Stock. Choose Rainman for performance one and Save.
Now we have all the pieces in place. We have our entries. We have our stock available. We will now generate the draw. Rodeo Setup > Generate Draw. We will choose our October competition, Initialize the draw, click Select the Rodeo button.
Because we have a very limited number of entries, uh we don't need to assign priorities, we can by pass this option. We will need to set the max number of entrants by event (it's a system requirement). We're going to suggest that we set these limits to something we know that will fit all of our entrants. 10 for Open Team Roping, 15 for Bareback, 10 for Senior Barrel Racing. Click Save Max Settings.
We have all of our settings in place. We're now going to hit Generate the Draw.
So a new draw has been generated. We can scroll down the list if we wish, it does say all entrance were placed in the draw.
The next step from here is to preview the draw. Rodeo Sheets - Draw Preview. Here is our draw preview for the October test rodeo. As we scroll down, we see we have we have Senior Barrel Racing in place with our assignments, our run order.
We have Open Team Roping with our members/teams and their draw order.
We have Bareback with our competitor draw. And we have the re-ride stock in place that we had set. We haven't ran the stock draw yet. So that is why these stock assignments are empty.
Our next step is to generate the stock draw. Rodeo Setup > Generate Stock Draw. We'll make sure our October rodeo is selected. We see the correct stock contractor in place. We know we have selected the stock required for each event. And we've now run the stock assignment draw.
The message tells us the draw has ran for Bareback. We can go back to Rodeo Sheets > Draw Preview, as we scroll down, we see Senior Barrel Racing and Open Team Roping in place as they were. Bareback now has the stock assignments in place including our re-ride stock.
Now that we've verified everything in the draw is the way we'd like it, we can make it visible for the members and spectators on the public side. Rodeo Setup > Set Rodeos. We will turn on the Show Draw settings and we click Save.
We can go to the member view (Start Menu > Go to Member View) and scroll down the list of rodeos here to the October Test rodeo. We now see the View Draw icon is available and this is the same view of the draw we were just looking at only now it's available to the members. It is shown as unofficial draw and we can see all the same information here.
Some organizations will leave a period of time for their members to review the draw and request changes. We would suggest after you have a look at the draw review here, as practice, you make a change. We are going to swap around the draw order of our second and third competitors in Bareback we will swap the stock assignments of sixth and seventh listed entrants. We go to Rodeo Setup > Adjust Draws, October Test rodeo, Bareback, and we scroll down to the list.
We are going to swap our second and third run orders here, then Submit Changes.
We see we have swapped these two in the run order.
For stock, we're going to swap Pepper for Backdoor and Backdoor for Pepper and we Submit Changes.
We see we have swapped these two stock assignments.
The reason we do this is simply to give us a little experience making changes and to confirm that everything is working there for us. So we'll go ahead and set this draw as official. Rodeo Setup > Set Rodeos. We will turn on the Draw as Official settings and we click Save.
When we preview that draw again, we will see it now says Official Draw.
Once the draw has become official, we know that there should be no changes to that between now and rodeo day. So we can work on our rodeo sheets. Generating the judges cards, the announcer sheets, and the day sheets. And we would recommend you view the videos or read the chapters on those topics as we won't go through those in detail.
Next it would be rodeo day and the events start and the scores and times start coming in. So we would go to Results > Enter Results. We are in our October Test rodeo. We would select the first event in the draw, Senior Barrel Racing. We would uh enter the times as they come in. Once the event is completed, then we'll hit Submit Results.
We're going to skip ahead entering times and scores for all three events and calculating all of the results. [...] We have just finished entering the scores for Senior Barrel Racing, Team Roping, and Bareback. We're checking through the net purse for Bareback as one of our checks. We have the entry fees less the 10% organization admin fee for a net purse of $643.50. We see that event awards points to 10 placings and the payout percentages are going to be 40, 30, 20, 10. First place points begin at 15.
We'll scroll down and just have a quick look and see if these payouts make sense. So we said we're paying out to four places. Here's 1, 2, 3, 4 and we're paying 15 points. In this organization, we have it set to be a decrement of two. So points of 15, 13, 11, 9, 7.5. We had a tie here. So we're splitting some points between two entrants. Everything looks correct there.
We can look at all of the events under Results > Rodeo Results Preview. It will load up our October Test rodeo. We see those same Bareback results. We have our Open Team Roping results and we have our Senior Barrel Racing results. This would be your review here.
If you're finding something is incorrect and for your test rodeo, we would say just pick out something. Let's take member number 120 in Bareback and let's change their money to $75 even. So we can go to Results > Review Results. We are in Bareback. We go to member 120. We change that money to 75 and we Submit. Now we can see $75 for the money and $75 under total money. Let's go check in the results preview for the October Test rodeo under Bareback for member number 120.
We see we have the money and total money updated after our manual edit. Once we've made our little adjustment here, the results are as we wish them to be. We would now be ready to show the results on the web. We go to Rodeo Setup > Set Rodeo, to our October Test rodeo and we can change the column for Show Results. We can turn that on and Save.
These results would now be visible to the members on the member side or any spectators. Anybody who is accessing the public side would be able to see that. If we are comfortable with everything being done, we change this to rodeo Official.
Now that it's official, this October Test rodeo is now going to be included in the Standings. We can go to Results > Season Standings Preview, and we will see the standings are updated, up to and including the October Test rodeo.
As this is our demo system, we have some other rodeos in here. So, if you were running only a test rodeo, you would find that your Season Standings and your Rodeo Results would match. If you happen to be doing an in-season rodeo as we are, we can now take that test rodeo and actually exclude it from standings. To confirm, we're just going to take a look at one of these members that we know won some money in the October rodeo. Jumping back to our Results Preview, we see member number 115, with winnings of $112.50.
We see this member in our Season Standings.
Now we go to Rodeo Setup > Set Rodeos, the October Test rodeo and Edit. We're going to scroll down here and we are going to Exclude From Rodeo Counts and Exclude From Standings by checking the option boxes. Save the settings.
Go back to our Season Standings Preview. Find our Senior Barrel Racing and we see that those winnings from the October rodeo have now been excluded from the standings.
That concludes the Test Rodeo. We do encourage you to test out the system and try changing options and view through the reports to see the impacts of changes. If you are receiving results or outputs other than expected, please contact the Support team at Rodeo Producer.