🥇Competitions
Learn what a competitions are and what they’re used for.
Last updated
Learn what a competitions are and what they’re used for.
Last updated
Competitions are how you assign athletes to compete and be ranked against one another. They only have athletes from one category, which can be further partitioned into subdivisions. Gym Art Meets provide tools to rapidly generate and evenly distribute athletes across subdivisions such that their team and coaches group them.
In this guide we'll cover:
Example
Here's an interactive guide showing how athletes, categories, sessions, and results are all linked together using competitions.
Competitions are groups of athletes that will compete and be ranked against each other. Athletes are organized into subdivisions, which are groups that will compete at the same time as each other. Team scores are also calculated for athletes in the same competition. Finally, each competition has settings to control how to break ties, whether to bump on ties and other parameters such as how many athletes contribute to the team score.
The distinction between competitions and categories is necessary because you may need to have multiple competitions per category. The most common example of this would be if you have a qualification round and a final round for the same category, but the final round only has a select few of the athletes from said category.
In the majority of cases you'll probably only need one competition per category.
Subdivisions are the sub-grouping of all the athletes you've added to the competition. For example, if there are 60 total athletes, you may want to create 3 subdivisions such that each has 20 athletes in it. An athlete cannot be in two subdivisions at once.
Subdivisions are significant when it comes to creating well-balanced sessions for your schedule. Only one subdivision may be assigned to a session. Therefore, if you have 60 athletes in subdivision 1 and try to assign them to a session, you'll have to figure out how they will all compete in the venue simultaneously!
For judges to enter scores for the athletes of competition, you must assign their subdivision to a session's rotations.
We provide a tool that allows you to generate and assign athletes into subdivisions automatically. Using this tool you can create competitions for specific categories and the necessary number of subdivisions. Additionally, it will divide athletes from each competition in a way that will make it easy for you to organize your sessions. For more details, please refer to our guide on creating competitions.
Subdivisions are made to be added to sessions. You can add multiple subdivisions of competitions from different categories to a single session, but you'll be prevented from adding the subdivisions of competitions from the same category.
For example, you may have Levels 1-4 competing in Session 1. If the total sum of all athletes of the four levels is somewhere around 24, you could certainly fit them all in your venue or plateau at once.
If you've been keeping track, you'll know that you'll need at least the number of subdivisions times the number of competition days amount of sessions to accommodate each competition. For example, if you have 4 subdivisions and 2 days of competitions you'll need a total of 4*2 = 8 sessions.
You'll need at least as many sessions as subdivisions to accommodate any competition.
Consider a qualifications competition during the Women's Artistic Senior World Championships.
Athletes: This competition has all the athletes from the Senior category competing.
If we consider 30 countries with 5 athletes each, this results in 150 athletes.
Subdivisions: We create 8 subdivisions for a large amount of athletes.
We aim to divide and create subdivisions of sizes of approximately 5 athletes per apparatus, which results in 4*5 = 20 athletes per subdivision.
Since we can't evenly divide 150 by 20 and want to keep the teams of five athletes together, we can create six subdivisions of size 20 and two of size 15. This results in all the (20*6) + (15*2) = 150 athletes being assigned to a subdivision.
Required sessions: With eight subdivisions and one competition we need 8*1 = 8 total sessions for this competition