💪Categories
Learn what a categories (or levels of competition) are and what they’re used for.
Last updated
Learn what a categories (or levels of competition) are and what they’re used for.
Last updated
Categories (or levels of competition) is a way to define the level of difficulty the different athletes are competing at. Categories can either be the well-defined FIG levels, or custom regional levels of your province of state. Each category has an age range and often different sets of rules attached. This means athletes from Category A will be judged on a different set of rules than those from Category B.
In order to create athletes in Gym Art Meets we first need to create categories to associate them to. A category is comprised of a name (Senior, Level 4, Level 2 U13, etc.) and age range, and estimated warmup and competition times. Futhermore, each category has a unique identifier associated to it (e.g. SENR, L4, L2U13) that allows the linking of ahtletes to that category.
Categories are not the same thing as competitions! There can be multiple competitions for one category. For example the Seniors may have a qualification competition, and apparatus final competition.
In order to distinguish one category from another when creating athletes, each category needs to have a unique identifier. Typically this identifier is a short but descriptive tag that allows one to immediately identify which category it is. It could, for example, be the first letters of the name, or an acronym.
Example identifiers for a women's category called Senior: SN, WSN, WSNR, SNR, SENR, SENIOR
It's recommended to keep team and category identifiers unique between them. In other words, don't create a category and a team with identifier SEN. Although you can technically do this, it will create confusion in the long run.
The age range in Gym Art Meets is suggestive meaning that the ages of the athletes you enter don't necessarily have to line up with the pre-defined age range of a category. The age range therefore is a guide for you and spectators to understand who the athletes are in general competing under that category.
Gym Art Meets provides the option to specify the average warm up and competition time of the category. Typically organizers will use historical data to estimate the average time it takes for athletes from that category to complete their warm up on an event, as well as compete.
These numbers are then used to calculate the expected time of a session, as we can easily predict the time it will take for the longest rotation (group of athletes) to warm up and compete. We therefore want to estimate the time it will take to warm up or compete on the "longest" apparatus, which is typically the floor exercise or parallel bars for men.
In general, one wants to work with worst case scenarios so that in the best of worlds, we end early.
The estimated warm up time is the time you believe the average athlete will take to complete their warmup on an event. This means that we are predicting the sum of time of all their warm up turns on that event, before competition. Sometimes athletes have a fixed amount of "touches" on an apparatus, so we would sum the time of each of those turns to get the estimated warm up time.
For example, we may estimate that the average athlete from Level 3 takes 2.5 minutes to complete their warmup on the Floor Exercise, or that a typical Level 1 takes 2 minutes to complete their three-allowed turns on the Pommel Horse.
The estimated competitoin time, as compared with the warm up time is typically shorter. In this case we are trying to predict the average time it takes to compete a routine as well as the time it takes to judge that routine.
The estimated warm up and competition times includes not only the practicing of skills but also the time it takes to prepare the apparatus
Accurately predicting these times will allow you as an organizer to efficiently create sessions that run smoothly and in a timely manner.
If you do not know the exact details of your categories, but have a general knowledge of how many you will be expecting, then you can leverage the powerful tool we provide to dynamically update your categories. Using the unique category identifiers, you can dynamically update existing categories by uploading a CSV with the new data but same identifiers. This will automatically disseminate the updated details across your meet and schedules.
Learn more about how you can leverage place holders by reading our place holder guide.
Consider the international category of Men's Artistic FIG Senior
The age range for men is 18+
We could use SR, or MSENR as an identifier
Estimated warmup time and competition is typically regulated and depends on the warmup type.
Warm up time of 2.5 min/athlete
Competition and judgement time of 2 min/athlete