Parents USAG divisions

[Serenity28]

how is it determined if a gymnast competes junior a, b, or Senior a, b, c.

 

[Seeker]

Sounds like you're talking about age groups at meets. That is determined by the meet director -- they generally try their best to,divide the registered gymnasts equally between the age groups. It isn't an exact (or easy) science and often leaves at least one person upset. But there are no USAG rules around this afaik.

 

[2G1B]

Yeah, for girls it is pretty meaningless. It just means the age group that that gymnast fell into. They are different at each meet, called different things and split different ways.

 

[SurpriseGymMom]

Yup, what 2G1B said. DD has two teammates close in age. throughout their competitive "career" they have been grouped all together or completely separately (States), or any combination thereof. DD is the middle one so she has been in the same age group with the one who is a month older sometimes, and at a different meet she would be in the group with the slightly younger one. Most of the time the meets seem to try to just make the numbers as even as possible.
It does matter for medals. There have been plenty of times where DD hasn't been on the podium in her age group but her score would have medaled in a different age group. It is what it is.... She's on the younger end so she tends to be in the group that has all the fabulous phenom gymmies, and she certainly isn't one of them.

 

[thefellowsmom]

This, exactly. The only other thing I would add is that not only do the age groups differ by name and age cutoff but also by size. You go to one meet and there are 9 in an age group, another 15 in an age group, some 20 or higher.

 

[Iwannabemargo]

see this is another thing I don't get., the moving age thing.

Here at a comp all the say level 4's will compete as one age group, and depending how many are there it might be 9, 10-12 13+ ( our level 4's, so your 5/6's). Its normal to have up to 60 in each age group at a big comp. All gymnasts are aged by their birth year, so 2002, 2004 etc so the 2002's all compete together no matter what etc etc. and top 3 will medal.

 

[Mrs. Puma]

This, exactly. The only other thing I would add is that not only do the age groups differ by name and age cutoff but also by size. You go to one meet and there are 9 in an age group, another 15 in an age group, some 20 or higher.

Around here it seems like the way they do it is based on how many kids are there. All the meets Puma Jr went to last year had around 20 an age group (I think the least was 17, the most 26 last year for us?) I think they just put them in birth order and chop it up as evenly as possible. Like if there happen to be 70 kids there, it would be 23/24 per age group. Three groups seems the most common for us, but sometimes it's more. States obviously was-I think there were 9. I'm good with this, personally.

 

[profmom]

Margo, what you describe is more like the way the boys' meets work in the US. It's almost always age years, split up into individual years for large groups and lumped together for smaller ones. (DS this year will almost always be in the 13-14 YO age group for medals except at regionals, where they'll break out the 13 and 14 year olds individually.)

It seems of late that most girls' meets try not to have many more than 15 or so in a grouping, and they just set the A-B, child/junior/senior cutoffs to make that happen as evenly as possible.

 

[MeetDirector]

Well, it is meet season again, so allow me to provide my tutorial on Age Divisions within a girl's meet.

The number of age divisions and the number of girls in a specific division is all about how much money a meet wishes to spend on awards. For each age division, awards are presented; within each age division, clubs typically either do only 1st thru 3rd or they go out 50% of the number in the division. It is solely determined by how much money they want to spend on awards.

The first thing I do when beginning the planning for a meet is figure out how many sessions I need, then I allocate the particular girls to that session. Then I figure out how many age divisions I want for each level in that session. Then I put all of the girls in each level in age order from youngest to oldest. Then I simply draw a line after the requisite number of girls. The names assigned to each age division are based on my own naming scheme; I usually go with Junior and Senior and then A, B, C, etc within each of those.

All of this is done for each level within a session; the groups do not cross between sessions and will not be the same from one session to another even if the name is the same.

Hope this helps.

 

[Ali'sMom]

Around here, they are divided evenly amongst the number of girls.
It was really strange for our girls to then end up at a meet that did it by age - there were over 20 7-9 year olds, but then 8 12-14 year olds.

 

[GymnastMomX2]

Here it seems they just split the age groups evenly, so if there were 100 girls and 5 age groups, each would have 20 girls in it. The age ranges could vary quite a bit in the oldest and youngest age groups.