Personally (Bob Bickel writing), I am not a fan of this. Some people who have been around the race business for years strongly believe in it. All new systems such as Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, etc. have a First Name, Last Name standard since using middle name as an identifier is not scalable. It also introduces another field and can cause confusion for those who are tabbing between fields for data entry. This can cause frustration on the part of users, and potential data quality issues. But our customers overrode my personal objections.