WAG how are age divisions for JO Nationals compiled?

[gymgal]

You would think that it would be fairly simple - take the number of L10s and divide them evenly into 8 age groups. Of course, many won't qualify for regionals but you still should have a pretty even number across the board. But that doesn't seem to be the case if there are some age divisions with up to 40 girls. Even if there are 2000 girls at level 10, that would still only be about 30 per age group. Do they purposely put more girls in certain age groups than others? What determines tha?

 

[ZJsMom]

I think they divide it evenly across the country, which comes out very uneven in some regions. Our region is small and it leads to strange results for level 9 and 10. Some groups are competitive and some age groups only have 3 girls in them at regionals.

 

[Deleted member 14190]

Are you asking about regionals or Nationals? At Nationals the numbers are the same across the board. At regionals you cannot change the number/age of potential kids in a division because it is already set for Nationals, which is based on a national average I was told. So yes, one age division may be stacked while another is small, but another region may be the opposite. Next year they will have 4 extra divisions, this will lessen the heavy divisions at regionals.

 

[gymgal]

Are you asking about regionals or Nationals? At Nationals the numbers are the same across the board. At regionals you cannot change the number/age of potential kids in a division because it is already set for Nationals, which is based on a national average I was told. So yes, one age division may be stacked while another is small, but another region may be the opposite. Next year they will have 4 extra divisions, this will lessen the heavy divisions at regionals.

Guess I didn't explain myself well enough. Sorry... I will try again. Was referring to regionals. I understand the divisions are the same for regionals and nationals but just looking at the numbers - if there are 2000 L10's competing each season (I think it's less, but that's an even number), and those 2000 are broken into 8 age divisions in 8 regions (64 groups total), you should be 31-32 gymnasts per age group. I am assuming (big assumption) that the national office gest the birthdates of all the L10 gymnasts. So why don't they just plug it in the system and set up the age groups evenly, like what happens in "most" meets throughout the season and at state meets? The youngest 32 go to Jr A. Next 32 go to Jr B. and so on... I fully understand that not everyone qualifies for regionals, so the divisions will not be totally even at the regional meets but at no time should there be more than 32. Most likely in the 25 range due to non-qualifiers. But that is not what happens. There are some groups that have upwards of 40. So that means that the national office is unevenly distributing the gymnasts in the divisions. I was just curious as to what the method is.

 

[ZJsMom]

The youngest 32 in one region would have a different age range than the youngest 32 in another region. They want junior A to mean the same thing in each region and at Nationals.

 

[Gymmonkeymomma]

The age groups are divided equally amongst all the gymnasts in the country. The unequal groups between Region 2 Jr A versus Region 7 Jr A are because of population within the regions. The regions are already determined, they don't divide gymnasts to fit the regions.

 

[gymgal]

The youngest 32 in one region would have a different age range than the youngest 32 in another region. They want junior A to mean the same thing in each region and at Nationals.

True. I wasn't thinking fully when I was writing. I really meant the youngest 32x8 (regions). So the youngest 250 (roughly) would be jr A and so forth. But now that I have time to think about it more, that still wouldn't work because you could theoretically have 50+ of those girls coming from one region and then none from another region.

Still, I am curious how they do figure it out and whether they try to figure in a maximum number of girls per age division per region.

 

[Natasha]

I believe they take the total # of L10 gymnasts that have scored at least a 32 and simply put them in chronological order and then divide into 8 equal age groups. Same thing for L9, only separate for East and West regions. I know at L9, at least for our region this results un unequal groups as either the L9's are generally younger than other regions or the upper SR levels have more girls that do not make the 34 qualifying score. Looking at the groups of L9's for the past 2 years for our region, the numbers ranged from 13 to almost 40. Unfortunately our region is one of the regions with much higher numbers of girls, but that is a whole other thread that I think appeared about this time last year…

 

[MeetDirector]

What @gymtigermom said is exactly correct; I know because I sent our state's numbers to the Region. At the Regional meet, they qualify the same number of girls to Nationals (JO/NIT or East/West) from each Region. There are procedures in case a particular Region doesn't have the requisite number to be able to send the required quantity of girls to nationals (they pull from other Regions based on previous year's ranking of Region, I believe). While it may seem at the Regional meet that the Age Divisions are unbalanced, it all evens out at the National meet. By the way, the same thing holds for Regionals at level 7 and 8 except that the age divisions are established by the Region rather than National.

Good Luck.