Parents Age grouping for optionals

[z2akids]

I probably shouldn't jump in here as I don't yet have an optionals competitor. However, I took a quick look at mymeetscores. Last season, the L8s on our team were placed in groups for medal/scoring purposes that had even members of gymnasts. The group's were generally labeled Jr.A, Sr. C, etc. This held true at our State Meet as well. However, at Regionals, some of the groups had 25ish gymnasts, while other groups had 50+.

My assumption is that all the meets, except Regionals, did what our gym does and puts all the girls at any one session at one level in a list by birthday and then figured out how many gymnasts they want per award group and cut off the groups by that number. This method means that 2 gymnasts with close ages on the sane team May compete against each other at one meet, but not at another. So, whether a child is competing in a group of all 10 year olds our mostly 11 year olds, etc., depends entirely on the spread of ages at a particular meet.

 

[Natasha]

As meet director said, the rules are the same for optionals and compulsories. However, there are typically less optionals so the age range tends to be bigger. And yes, often in beginning levels of optionals, the youngest age group can be the most competitive because those are the girls with the talent to get to L10 at a young age. If your daughter is a young beginner optional, I would encourage you to especially view her first year as practice for optionals and not worry too much about placement as she will have years to go and each level will have its own challenges. Just try to enjoy the ride. And do not worry about older girls in her age group, generally those are not the ones you need to be worried about...

 

[cbifoja]

At most meets last year my 9 YO was in an age group for 10 and under. This was at L6/L7. At state, they did the Jr. A, Jr. B, etc. thing. For that meet she was with girls who were young 11YOs and younger. But Junior B also contained 11YOs. So they obviously used the system z2akids described in the post above. But we also went to a small meet and the L7 competitors were few enough that it was just an open age group for awards so she was competing against 2nd year L7s who were 14 years old.

Honestly, it didn't really matter as far as her score was concerned. Her scores were pretty consistent across all the meets with the typical creep up that you would expect to see as she improved over the season. And since she doesn't care about awards, she didn't mind that she was competing against and losing to girls older than herself. I really think that for her, her only competition is whether or not she hits her routines.

 

[happychaos]

There are times when there are a lot of girls competing at a given level, and the awards grouping is not a range (ie: "12 and under" or "11-12 YO") but "11 YO" or "10 YO" or whatever. If this girl on our team was in the "11 YO" awards bracket, then she competed as an 11-year-old. NOT as a 12-year-old, as she should have, since her birthday was the weekend of state meet and she technically should have been classified as 12 years old all season.

But that is just the title of the group...right? Just because they call the awards group "11 y/o" doesn't mean there couldn't be a few older 10 y/o's or younger 12 y/o's. You could still be a 12 y/o according to USAG, but be thrown into the 11 y/o awards group.

If there were, say, 20 10 y/o's, 36 11 y/o's, and 20 12 y/o's, they may want to take a the oldest 11's and put them with the 12's and the youngest 11's, and put them with the 10's. As I understand it, it's the meet directors discretion to do this in order to balance the size of the awards groups.

Anyway, that is the way I understood it to be. Otherwise, we have been to some meets that are doing it wrong too.

 

[mariposa]

I've learned it really doesn't matter what age group they are in, etc. There are talented kids at every age and gymnastics will never be "fair".

 

[raenndrops]

If there were, say, 20 10 y/o's, 36 11 y/o's, and 20 12 y/o's, they may want to take a the oldest 11's and put them with the 12's and the youngest 11's, and put them with the 10's. As I understand it, it's the meet directors discretion to do this in order to balance the size of the awards groups.

Anyway, that is the way I understood it to be. Otherwise, we have been to some meets that are doing it wrong too.

When that happens, they often change the names of the groups... not using age numbers... or they say 10-11A ... 11B .... 11C-12 Basically something to delineate the age groups. IF they didn't do that, the people in charge of awards would have a MAJOR headache on their hands (BT/DT one year, big meet, the computer program bumped up all kids who had birthdays after December 1 through mid-March. A few kids ended up in different age groups and a couple of the parents threw fits because their child didn't place as well in the older age group.)

 

[MeetDirector]

For award purposes, or age divisions within a meet, the goal is equal size groups. This is stated in the USAG Rules and Policies. Now the number of groups, and hence the number of athletes in each group, in a session is driven by how many awards you want to hand out. Say for example you want to go out 6 places and you want to award 50%, then you would have 12 girls in an age division or award group. So what drives the number of awards a meet gives out? You guessed it - money. We decide on our award budget as the first item for our meets; it is not cheap.

More and more meets are going to the date ranges for age divisions. The scoring software is easier to setup that way too.