Dear Masters Athlete

We hope you, your family and your friends are healthy, safe and doing great. Condolences to you if you have lost loved ones. The corona virus has touched so many of our lives in one way or another. You may know I always look for the good in everyone and everything. I see people doing good things for others, working together and much more that is good and sparked by this tragedy. People’s kindness is heartwarming and an ever-present reminder of the camaraderie within Masters Athletics.

It is my honor and great pleasure to serve you, Masters Athletes and Masters Athletics. You are always welcome to contact me anytime ( Click for all options)

Stay healthy and have fun,

John Seto

MastersRankings.com also known as World Masters Rankings.

It doesn't just happen

Many visitors to the Rankings site think updating lists is mostly automated and it does not take much to maintain the site. While we use automated processing where we can, there is much we need to do including finding meet results online, converting them so our programs can insert performances, review athletes / performances... The majority of listed performances are not sent to us and we don't have a big team. Our team is comprised of a very small group of volunteers who help find and convert results for inserting as well as Linda (the wife of an insane dictator who tries her best to help wherever she can), John (the insane dictator who is obsessed with serving Masters Athletics) and Becky (who supervises her mother and father which mostly means laughing at them while they work) - Becky and Linda are in the photo below. The workload, while, in my opinion, worthwhile because of what it does for our sport and Masters Athletes, is immense.

Memberships support this site

Memberships and voluntary contributions, as many of you realize, are what enable this site to keep going. You may remember that the whole site was originally available to everyone. I hoped that voluntary contributions would be enough to support the site but was grossly mistaken - I was still paying site's expenses and not working any paying job. I introduced memberships in June 2016 hoping that enough would be raised to support the site. Most members' features help athletes during the current year - members see where they stand and can easily follow the competition using their custom watchlist. Therefore, some might not be inclined to renew or subscribe.

Memberships for less in April

To thank you for your help ensuring MastersRankings continues to benefit our sport and Masters Athletes worldwide, we offer reduced minimum contribution for membership. Anyone contributing a minimum of $15US in April will receive a membership or renewal good for 1 year from activation or renewal date plus be eligible to renew for the same minimum contribution in 2021.

The stoppage of virtually all competitions worldwide gives me a chance to take a breath and reflect. Responses to my 2014 inquiry about doing worldwide rankings seemed to miss my stating that I would consider viability of compiling. Not wanting to disappoint you, we started the mission. I have realized that the mission needed to encompass much more to maximize benefits to our sport. MastersRankings' plan and vision has been adjusted accordingly. Rankings lists and enabling you to see where you stand is of paramount importance but we are also supporting WMA, WMA Regions and WMA Members (national federations) to improve what is done for Masters Athletes. This includes compiling historical performances, championship medalists and other data that the organizations use to update Age Grade factors, prepare Hall of Fame qualifications and consider award nominee accomplishments. We work on progressing the vision and plan which results in some things, like finding, converting and inserting some meet results, not happening as timely as we would like. Typically, we work on things that take little time immediately so our to-do list doesn't grow as much.

We had more to do in 2019. The versions for our databases, server operating system, CMS and programming language were all end of life and needed updating. This meant we had to update the versions plus reprogram the entire site. We are about 90% done with reprogramming (it takes much longer trying to do between the many other daily tasks).

Even with the additional workload, we were able to insert 376,713 performances in 2019 (almost what we did in 2018 and more than we inserted in 2017). To date this year, we have added about 1,215 per day (over 113,000).

2019 was our most productive in terms of tasks completed. We have refined processes and procedures plus further developed cooperative relationships enabling us to get more done.

We have already started to work on reducing our queues. Last I checked, our total number of tasks exceeded 50,000 (taking between seconds to weeks to complete). We have the fantastic opportunity now to complete many of these much more productively. As many of you who are working from home are realizing, there are fewer distractions (phone calls, co-workers asking questions, etc.) so we can be more productive now. Here are some of our goals over the next few months:

We are excited that we have this opportunity to get mostly or fully caught up. We encourage you to tell us what you want to see and improvements or features you want using the Contact form.

We are using support@mastersrankings.com and management@mastersrankings.com for many communications which may get caught in your spam folder. Please tag these email addresses as safe senders so you can see our correspondences.