Vault Judging (yet again)

[CoachTodd]

We hosted a meet this weekend and all went well but I'm still confused by the vault is judged for the women's USAG program.
I try to train the front handspring vault as if the vaulter plans on flipping someday be it a front front or tsuk. I coach a short preflight for a higher vault that actually has some rotation. ( I won't go into any further detail as it would take too long )

I'll use my own girls as examples for my question about how the heck do the judge the front hand spring vault.

First I set the table with my "Goal" vaulter. This is what I'm trying to train toward.

She's about 5'4", the table is set on 6 and the board is 1'9" away.
At our meet she did a front front at level 9 and scored a 9.575
She enters with a tight arch with nearly no preflight with her shoulders not quite completely open when she hits the table the opens for more block. This puts her regular front hand spring 6 to 7 feet above the vault table.

Here are my example vaults from the meet

Vaulter A: Table is low for her height due to fear issues. She hits the springboard, preflight with a slightly more than hollow shape, reasonably low entry angle, stays on the table a bit long for my taste, low block, ok distance.
She score 8.75 I think

Vaulter B: Table is a good height for what I can tell. She has a similar vault to my goal vaulter with a slight arch (more of the butt sticking out than an arch) during the post flight and scores 8.4

Vaulter C: Normally similar vaults to my goal vaulter. Nice block good entry and so forth. She vaults and admits that it didn't feal like she got much block and the vault felt bad.
She scored 9.375

Vaulter B: had a better vault than A but A had cleaner shapes.

The best I can tell is the judges want the girls to vault with power but do the entire vault in a hollow shape. The last time I looked, front handsprings weren't hollow.

Any thoughts are welcome.

 

[gympanda]

In the compulsory vaults we are actually looking for a straight position, rather than hollow or arched. There is an up to .3 deduction for arch (in all three phases of the vault) and an up to .5 for pike (in all three phases). So the "pike" or bent hips position is more penalized than the arch position.

When I judge vault I pay the most attention to the repulsion angle (up to 1.0), how long the gymnast is on the vault (up to .5), height (up to .5), distance (up to .3) and dynamics (up to .3). In the area I judge in, we make a point to reward the power vaulters, and have a judge who judges a TON of vault who always tells the girls when they present that if they can land off the end of the landing mat he will automatically give them a 10...obviously its never happened.

If you are trying to figure out vault scoring, especially in compulsorys, I honestly wouldn't. I would focus on where you are trying to go with their training and ignore the scores.