Parents Stupid Question About Competition Brackets

[Mom2Chickadee]

DD will have her first competition next month and I noticed that there are 4 groups of the same age bracket (i.e. Level 4 age 9&10A, Level 4 age 9&10B, etc). Two questions: (1) how do they decide which gymnasts go into each bracket, DD and her 2 teammates are in different brackets and (2)why, if they have enough for 4 brackets, didn't they compete the 9 years separately from the 10 year olds? Maybe both are random decisions based on how the gym chooses to organize it, but it just made me wonder.

 

[suebee]

My understanding is that they will take all the 9-10 year olds and put the younger half in the A group and the older half in the B group.

There are probably not enough 9 year olds to make their own group. So say in the session, there are 60 kids total, with 7 9 year olds, 23 10 year olds, 15 11 year olds and 15 12 year olds. There are not enough 9 year olds for their own age group, so they will put the 7 9 year olds and the 8 youngest 10 year olds in the 9-10 A group and the rest of the 10 year olds are in the 9-10 B group. Then you have an 11 year old and a 12 year old age group, each also with 15 kids.

 

[MeetDirector]

First, please don't call the age divisions "brackets" as that implies a head-to-head structure like the NCAA Basketball brackets. Gymnastics uses "age divisions". Next, here is the text that I posted to a similar thread:

"It is all about the numbers - number of athletes in a given level and number of dollars the meet wants to spend on awards. I have seen age groups anywhere from 20 to less than 10. I personally prefer about 12 athletes in an award group. Notice, I do not call them age groups; I do not divide groups based on specific age, rather I divide based on birthday range just the way the regionals and nationals are divided. I then give the resulting groups a name not involving a specific age."

The modern scoring software will actually do a very good job of balancing the numbers in each award group after you tell it how many groups you want which is tied to how many awards you want to give out.

Hope this helps.

 

[vbdb]

They usually sort by birthdate and then put them in scoring groups of 8-10 kids here in Ontario. They're together because there likely aren't enough 9 year olds to have their own scoring group.
The scoring group has no bearing on your rotation grouping as kids from the same gym could be in different scoring groups but the same rotation group.

 

[Mom2Chickadee]

Thanks for the replies, grouping birth year and age from youngest to oldest makes sense. Sorry about the wrong use of terminology...still fairly to gymnastics and brand new to DD competing.

 

[MeetDirector]

... Sorry about the wrong use of terminology...still fairly to gymnastics and brand new to DD competing.

No worries. I didn't have a clue about this stuff when our dd started oh so many years ago. Little points like this help others understand this crazy sport that our amazing kids do.

 

[momstrong]

DD will have her first competition next month and I noticed that there are 4 groups of the same age bracket (i.e. Level 4 age 9&10A, Level 4 age 9&10B, etc). Two questions: (1) how do they decide which gymnasts go into each bracket, DD and her 2 teammates are in different brackets and (2)why, if they have enough for 4 brackets, didn't they compete the 9 years separately from the 10 year olds? Maybe both are random decisions based on how the gym chooses to organize it, but it just made me wonder.

There are no stupid questions!

 

[Kcanflip]

We had identical twins end up in different age groups once. They just happened to be at the cut off and start for the age groups as divided by birthdate!

 

[Ali'sMom]

We had identical twins end up in different age groups once. They just happened to be at the cut off and start for the age groups as divided by birthdate!

Now that's funny!!! That would definitely make for some confusion!