WAG High Scoring v. Low Scoring Meets

[chalkbowl]

A jump off of a thread in the parent forum. Obviously some meets are notoriously high scoring and others are notoriously lower scoring. I live in a state where are scores, overall, tend to be extremely high (L3 state had 18 38s so several of those kids didn't even take first AA!!! 91 kids scored 37+). I typically warn my athletes when we go to out of state meets to expect lower scores. Parents: do coaches explain this to you and/or your athlete before going in to meets that might be either higher and/or lower scoring? Or is something that you have just figured out over time? Coaches: How do you handle going in to a meet where you know your athletes will have drastically different scores?

 

[cadybearsmommy]

I don't think we've ever ran into higher/lowing scoring full meets (and we have competed out of state) but we have ran into single events that judges seemed to be scoring very low on. For instance, at state last year girls who were consistently scoring 9.5's to 9.7's on floor were being scored more like 9.1's to 9.3's. My dd WON floor at state last year with a 9.3. However it usually evens out, b/c at the same meet the vault judges were scoring pretty high.

 

[cbifoja]

We ran into something like cadybear talks of. At our state meet a couple of years ago, in the first rotation, bar scores were ridiculously high....to the point that the meet director talked to the bar judges about it. The next rotation, the scores dropped like hot rocks. Sucked for the remaining girls because the girls in the first rotation basically swept the bar awards. One of our powerhouse gyms got REALLY angry about that whole fiasco.

I've also not seen entire meets that score high or low. DD seems to be pretty consistent in her scores regardless of where she is.

 

[Deleted member 18037]

Scores are relative. Its not about just one number. Our coaches go out of their way to tell them not to focus on individual numbers. They focus on skills and improvement.

Its also my experience if a kid is good, while the numbers may change, their placement (barring any abberations like a fall) will typically be in the same general area. So the podium kids will be on the podium. The middle kids will be in the middle. The lower kids in the lower.

Then you get the kids who are at the point where the 0.05 -0.1 can make a difference in placement and then its SH.

 

[profmom]

Thinking back, I think we've tended to hear more from the coaches (via the athletes) warning us about low scoring meets than high scoring meets. But pretty much after we've been to a real outlier in one direction or the other once or twice, we figure out what to expect the next time we go. My kids are both experienced enough by now to know when they're getting gifts.

I don't think my kids care much about the scores being generally high or low as long as the ordinals make sense, but it is always nice when the event is judged correctly (ahem, L6 pbar judges, the moy to support and the giant are the specified bonuses; the moy to upper arm is not).

 

[Taurus]

Too young & too much competition to have to travel out-of-state yet, but would like to know why a coach would tell level 3s that a particular judge "hates" our team- before the meet even starts!!!

 

[Deleted member 18037]

Too young & too much competition to have to travel out-of-state yet, but would like to know why a coach would tell level 3s that a particular judge "hates" our team- before the meet even starts!!!

Maybe based on experience that might be true.

I wouldn't tell a bunch of little kids that but it may in fact be true.

 

[mom2newgymnast]

From what I have learned here, I guess our state tends to have fairly higher scores on average. But I haven't seen or heard of any meets within our state, at the compulsory level anyway, that are notoriously high or low. Scores seems pretty consistent across all meets my dd has been to. The gym my dd goes to doesn't do any meets outside our state in compulsaries so I guess it doesn't matter anyway. Our optionals do travel to well known meets out of state, in fact they only have 1 meet other than the state meet that is in our state, and they seem to score and place similarly at all of their meets.

I do think it's an interesting question though. I'd love to see how the exact same routine would score in a variety of states just for curiosity sake. I understand that some states are just super full of very talented gymnasts and that what would be exceptional in my state might be just average in another state such as Texas. It seems impossible to compare when scores can vary so widely based on the state though. I know that in the upper levels they have the regional and national competitions to directly compare gymnasts in different states, but nothing like that for the compulsaries right?

 

[gymgal]

Most of the time it is pretty obvious if you live in one of these states. The scores will rise/fall based on whether you have stepped over the state line. But as another poster noted - it doesn't really matter as long as the placements are correct, which they usually are.

 

[SurpriseGymMom]

Our state seems to be pretty low scoring compared to most here, at least for L4-up. I think they're fairly generous for L3 (DD skipped that level BUT I have heard from the other parents that the scoring from L3-L4 was quite a rude awakening for most of the girl...). We routinely compete in our neighboring state as well and it does seem as a general rule, the girls all score about a half point or so higher there... Still not usually enough to get into the 38's or anything (those scores pretty much baffle me, and our gym is routinely on the podium so it's not that we're horrible...) but it might make the difference between a 32AA and a 33.5-34...

 

[SurpriseGymMom]

To put it this way.... Our compulsory girls get a special incentive for hitting a floor score above 9. Not everyone makes that every year. I don't think DD hit it last year (L5) and I know a few others didn't either. The year before she did towards the end of season, but there were still a few girls on her team who did not. I think we have a couple of girls with impeccable form who routinely get low 9's on bars, but most are in the low 8's and still end up on the podium. Vault scores above 9 are VERY rarely seen. Beam I would say a really good, solid routine with no falls scores in the high 8's, possibly very low 9's.

 

[Deleted member 17723]

I go to a YMCA gym. If there is a meet such as Regionals or any USAG meet, we are warned before that the judging will be harder, meaning lower scores. Our girls usually handle it well. We are also told at the end of a meet if the judging was easy or something, so that we don't start expecting those scores consistently.
SurpriseGymMom, we also do incentives for getting a 9 on floor. Well now it is 9.3. We can change our ending pose, so it is special to us (even if it sounds dumb to you guys lol).

 

[AgingHippie]

The coaches do not usually warn the girls beforehand but this being our third year in compulsories we know which meets they are.

Placement on the podium is the best indicator for sure.

 

[duyetanh]

Too young & too much competition to have to travel out-of-state yet, but would like to know why a coach would tell level 3s that a particular judge "hates" our team- before the meet even starts!!!

That sucks.

 

[duyetanh]

There are always a few meets that are like this for us. And within those meets there are judges who score one event high while the other is very low. It's wild.

 

[gymmiemom]

We compete in several different states, so for us scoring is always changing. But I have found that even if the scores are .5 different the placements are usually close to the same. So a girl who competed in one state and won beam with a 9.3 could go to a different state the next weekend and win with an 8.9.

Our coach is very clear about how much scores don't matter. Improving your routines on a personal level is what counts the most. She is very clear with the girls from the very beginning.

 

[needcoffee]

This this is actually something that totally blows my mind. I understand gymnasts have good days and bad days and average days and individual scores aren't always going to be the same as the previous meet, but we had a meet this year where the floor judges must have been totally happy to not deduct anything from anyone. I think the kid who came in dead last on floor still got an 8.9 or something.

The next meet DD won first place on floor with a 9.25, so I guess the judges weren't feeling very generous that day.

(We compete against the exact same kids all year).

 

[Ausi_poppet]

I think handling variable judging is something that definitely develops with experience. I've noticed that the older girls in higher levels get pretty good at judging and will tell newer parents if they think a particular apparatus is tough today. Ultimately, I think the gymnasts also learn to compete for other things than a specific score - like being selected for a team or nailing a new skill.

 

[gymdog]

Lol, I'm pretty sure we have TEAMS in my state that had 18 38s at state. Just looked it up. Almost 80 38+. Which is more than 10% of the total interestingly enough.

This is not to say that I think we are any better than the other, more populated areas (on the contrary, I think our scores are just higher and also that some of those area have a much shorter season than us while our kids compete nearly the entire school year). But, on the other hand, I have also seen routines from less populated areas score higher than they would have here. So it's a mixed bag. That said, I think it's important to recognize the barriers faced by coaches and gymnasts in these areas where there isn't a big gymnastics community.

so I guess my overall point is it's almost impossible to compare. USAG had put a judging presentation together that traveled throughout the regions and they had brevet judges along with the compulsory committee judge routine videos they had taken from meets around the country. And they also judged some of the routines that had been filmed but were ultimately "out takes" from the optional level kids who demonstrated the routines in the compulsory materials. And those scores for any given routine were lower than almost any scores I see around the country (I watch tons of routines on YouTube) and the judges could back it up too. Fairly competent (so, had all the skills, landed them without falling) compulsory routines that we would expect to get an 8.5 or so today got low to mid 7s. Today to get a low to mid 7 in some compulsory meets you need two falls, a missing element, or making the elements in a barely minimum way.

And that's how it used to be in compulsories (and any level really). I can definitely remember an 8 being good and a 9 being rare, like just a few in a meet at all across all kids and levels. It wasn't rare to win or place high having gotten all 8s and 32-34. I think that in some ways, through the wide amount of information available now and also the overall rise of USA Gymnastics in general, compulsories have gotten a lot better, and a lot more competitive. But I also think some of it is just score inflation. It used to be that some kids didn't make it to states or didn't even get the very minimum scores to move up despite having the skills. Now I feel like it is just a formality even when they don't make their beam dismount, etc. So I'm not sure about that. But I will say some of the compulsories you see today that are so polished were unheard of when I was a kid. If you were that good you definitely moved up, even if (insert whatever excuse). You just did. But times were different and overall it was less competitive so I understand why this phenomenon is happening now. And I'm not complaining, overall the rise of USA gymnastics as a whole, AT EVERY LEVEL, is almost mind boggling when you think about it. It's incredible. So, I can't complain.

 

[flips4fun]

We just had our compulsory state meet last weekend (levels 3-5). There was one 38 all around in the entire competition. Definitely varies by area. I've coached in region 8 and region 5 in the past. Routines that would have scored ~9.5 in those regions score 8.8ish here and they almost never give a score above 9.3. However, as long as the best routine gets the best score I don't worry too much about what that score was.