Formulas for Lookups

Hi, I'm new to the forum and trying to get some thoughts on how to solve what I see as a tough formula to write.

I am writing a swim meet XLS sheet for Master's swimming where we are looking up normalized data to give each swimmer a handicap based on age and gender. We ran into a problem where there was so much manual input that it threw the formulas for a loop. In the end it took a lot of painstaking work to fix it.

Now my thought is to have a single place where each coach has a page to enter information about their swimmer, the data i need from them is name/age/gender along with events that the swimmer is swimming, they'll be placed either Fast/Medium/Slow for lane seedings. So while writing this lookup, I'm struggling to get a horizontal and vertical match on the event and F/M/S ranking that the swimmer is swimming. The idea is to have two sheets, one for visitors and the other for the home team that the coach fills out and then a lookup merge to produce a meet, and that this file lookups up the handicap table that's already built.... whew... any ideas are appreciated.