Competition & results

Personal bests and season bests

How PBs are calculated, and why your season runs from a different month depending on the sport.

Club adminsCoachesParents & guardiansAthletesReviewed 2 September 2026

Athletes usually track two numbers: their personal best, which is all-time, and their season's best, which resets each season. Proletics keeps both.

A personal best is recalculated whenever results change, and respects the discipline's direction — lower is better for a time, higher for a throw.

When your season starts

Seasons do not start in the same month for every sport, so each sport carries its own start month. Proletics ships researched defaults, and you can override any of them for your club.

SportSeason starts
AthleticsJanuary — athletics scores season bests by calendar year
FootballAugust
CricketApril
Rugby union, netball, hockey, cross countrySeptember
Rugby leagueFebruary
Swimming, tennisJanuary
GymnasticsOctober
Cross country is treated as its own sport rather than as athletics, because its season runs September to March while track athletics is scored across the calendar year. A club doing both genuinely has two seasons running at once, and that is handled.

Changing your season

If your club's calendar differs from the default — a Scottish gymnastics club, for instance, whose governing body year starts in September rather than October — set the season start month on that sport and it overrides the default.

Two sports carry a caveat. Athletics splits into indoor and outdoor, and swimming into long course and short course, and in both the two halves are genuinely separate records. Proletics currently treats a season best as a whole-year best in both cases.

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