New Design & Ideas

Hello,
This is my first post here. I am fairly new to Access and haven't really played with SQL yet. I am more interested in keeping this db on the Access level.

What I am trying to do is to create a db for our provincial speed skating association that has the potential to do many things - one thing that I would like to be able to do is to have my db update from data that comes in from Excel or from a meet table and update the record for a skater.
eg. each skater has 4 distances they skate and if they have a new personal best then I would like to have their main record updated with new time, the date and the meet - I am guessing that this would be a query or report - or does this get more into VBA programming? (I should know about Access within a month and can likely see this might be a dumb question now - but I am a teacher on spring break and I am looking to work on this this week as I have the time to do so...)

Part of my goal is to be able to start setting up the db now and do the programming later & I figure that it would be a waste of time to set it up wrong now so that I can't do what I desire in the long run.

Sorry for the long post - I figured better more info that not enough.