Stats don't lie

How do you know how many tee shirts to order when your event is 3 months away and you have no idea of how many folks will attend. With the way our economy is going I would think our numbers may be down. Folks may not want to spend the money to travel in tight times. What we do have is a way of tracking our participant numbers each year. Since we work on excel we can get a pretty good guesstimate of how many shirts to order by looking at previous years participation. Using this method we can see how we stack up with years past. This is what we have so far for this years marathon compared to years past:

09 08 07 06 05
Marathon 199 vs 233 153 180 93
Half 99 vs 50 19 na na
Relay 15 vs 18 17 9 4

As you can see we are holding our own with the marathon entries. Last year was our best yet. And this years numbers show us above years 2005-2007. This is the first year of our half marathon and it shows 99 pre registered or twice as many as this time last year. Last years event was a ten miler. The relay continues to stay close to the last two years numbers. Most relay teams wait till the last minute to sign up. With these numbers in mind we then use a formula to order our performance tees. Stats.....they just don't lie.