Trackie.ca launches new CIS website with Athletics Canada

What began as a coding project for two brothers has evolved into a company and website for two Canadian runners.

In 2002, twin brothers Adam and Matt Stacey began coding a website to fill a missing hole in the internet covering Canadian track and field. That website was Trackie.ca.

“We were both runners at the University of New Brunswick and we were both in computer science. This was just a project to learn about website coding, so we built Trackie.ca.” Adam says. “We started just reporting on Canadian track and field. In the first version we had a basic message board and we did a few interviews with different athletes.”

Adam mostly runs the website himself now.

The website has evolved to encompass a new race registration system which was adopted by Athletics Canada for national championship meets. This led to the two organizations having recently debuted a new Canadian Interscholastic Sport-specific website together.

The two teamed up because the CIS was looking for someone to take over the Sporting Canada website’s role of ranking results and Athletics Canada already had the database system in place for ranking their own competitions and seasons outside of the CIS.

“So that new ranking system will be on the new CIS site instead of on Sporting Canada,” said Adam.

The website has taken off in the last year. Adam redid a lot of the front-end in March and has seen success. There has been a flurry of activity on the message boards recently. Adam says the site’s traffic has tripled since last fall to nearly 150,000 monthly visitors.

But Adam has more plans coming. He has recently launched a membership database, also with Athletics Canada, where all the members and coaches can register and manage their clubs and athletes. His’ hope is to revamp the registration site to make it more user friendly.

“Say, the coach of the Ottawa Lions could go in there and input information on the athlete’s and the Ottawa Lions Track Club and easily register for a national championship. Since the information is already there it’s very easy to share.” said Adam.

If the website continues to grow it could come to encompass a more prominent place in the Canadian running scene, but for now Adam is just taking it one stride at a time.

Note: a previous version of this article claimed Adam and Matt work together on the website, but it was brought to our attention Matt has moved on to other projects.