β‘Assign athletes to rotations
Learn how to assign athletes across rotations, assess the session's quality, and reorder athletes. Also learn about our tool that automates the whole process!
Overview
The complex task of assigning many athletes across rotations in a gymnastics meet has never been easier with Gym Art Meets. We provide a tool to instantly assign the athletes to rotations in seconds while ensuring the quality of experience of the athletes, coaches, and judges. We also provide an analysis tool to assess the quality of experience of the session for the participants so you can make sure you've organized a great session.
In this guide, you'll learn how to
Use the automation tool and play around with it's settings
Understand and assess the quality of a session
Add and remove individual athletes to a rotation at any point
To assign athletes, you must first add competition subdivisions to your session.
You can manually add (or modify) athletes in a rotation at any point in this process.
Auto-assign athletes to rotations
Gym Art Meets comes with a tool that allows you to automatically assign athletes to the rotations of your session. It does so instantly, and also by grouping athletes by their team (gym club) and their categories.
To use the tool follow these steps:
Navigate to the Rotations section of your session
Click on the Auto-assign athletes button
Set the parameters to your liking (see below for what they do)
Click Assign
An optimal set of rotations will be entered into your session.
Afterwards, you can always add or remove athletes from rotations or reorder them.
To use this tool you must first add subdivisions of athletes to your session. Learn how to do that in this guide
How does it work?
The auto-assign tool for rotations works in the following way:
Orders the athletes by team and category
Divide the group of athletes into evenly sized-groups
Assign the athletes to the rotations
Evaluate the quality of the session
Repeat steps 1-4 many, many times until either a 100% score appears, or all combinations have been tried. If 100% is not attained, take the best version of rotations and apply it to your session.
Below is a visual guide on how the magic happens:
Parameters
You'll see a few different settings you can change in the dialogue used to assign your athletes. Each setting changes how Gym Art Meets finds the best set or rotations for you. Below are explanations of what each setting does.
Max athletes per rotation
Decide up to what size of rotation to try. It will begin by trying the smallest possible size of rotation and continue up to the max athletes per rotation. If there is an optimal (100% score) set of rotations, it will stop.
For example, if you have 20 athletes and four rotations, the minimum size of rotation is 5 = 20/4. However, if you set this number to 7, Gym Art Meets will try rotation sizes up to 7. In other words, it will first try a bunch of rotations with sizes 4, 5, 6, and 7. If a 100% score is found with rotation size 6, it will stop before trying 7.
You can prevent Gym Art Meets from trying all different rotation sizes up to the max by enabling Use fixed rotation size
Use fixed rotation size
If you want to have a fixed rotation size, set this to true. This will prevent Gym Art Meets from trying other rotation sizes.
For example, if we have 20 athletes with a max athlete per rotation set to 7, it will only generate rotations of size 7. In this case, that would be rotations of sizes 7, 7, 6, 0.
Category-Team bias
The category-team bias tells the algorithm whether to prioritize grouping athletes by category or by team. Since each athlete has two independent variables, namely their category and team, you can tell the algorithm to prioritize creating rotations grouped by either (or both) the category and team. This will change how Gym Art Meets evaluates the quality of the rotations.
Even bias: if left in the middle, it will try to simultaneously group athletes evenly by team and category
Team bias: If you set the slider to the right, it will group the athletes by team only and ignore their category
Category bias: If you set the slider to the left, it will group the athletes by category only and ignore their team
Pinning athletes to a rotation
If you know you want some athletes to be in one rotation but want to re-assign the rest across the rotations, you can pin any athlete to the rotation they are in. This will prevent the algorithm from moving the pinned athletes into other rotations when generating a new set.
To do so, click the pin button beside any of the athletes in the rotation. A filled pin signifies the athlete will stay in the rotation following any re-assignment.
Manually add, remove, and re-order athletes
Whether you have generated rotations or want to enter them manually, you have full control over who's in each rotation. The athletes available to add to rotations are those who are in the subdivisions of the competitions that have been added to the session.
Adding athletes
You can also manually add athletes to rotations. This can be done before or after the rotations have been assigned. To add athletes follow these steps:
Click the "+ Athletes" button on the rotation's tile.
Select the athletes you want to add
Use the search bar to filter by team, category, or name
Only athletes currently un-assigned to rotations and in competitions in this session are displayed. An empty list means you've assigned them all, or need to add competitions!
Click add and the athletes will appear in your rotation
Only athletes who are not in other rotations are available to add to a rotation.
Removing athletes
To remove athletes from a rotation, you can either click the Remove button beside the athlete tile to remove the individual athlete or use the Remove All button under the athlete list to remove all athletes. They will then be available to add to any other rotation.
The athletes available to add to a rotation are only the ones that are not assigned. Removing athletes therefore frees them up to be re-assigned to another rotation. Please note that removing them does not remove them from the competition's subdivision.
Ordering athletes
Once athletes are in a rotation, their initial competition order is displayed in their rotation's tile. To change their initial order, click and drag the handle beside the athlete's tile to reorder them. The new order will automatically be saved upon any modification.
Assessing the quality of a session
Once you have added your athletes to your rotations, we provide a tool to assess the quality of experience for your athletes, coaches and judges. From this analysis table, you will be able to see a summary of how many rotations each category and team is split into, and whether or not the rotations can be improved.
The "Rotation score" is the top-level score that is the average of both the "Team score" and "Category score". A 100% means that the categories and teams have not been split excessively across the rotations.
Our objective as an organizer is to create sessions with a 100% "Rotation score" (and therefore 100% team and category scores as well). That score will immediately tell us that the experience for athletes, coaches, and judges cannot be made better.
To find the analysis of any given set of rotations navigate to the Rotations page of your session and click the Analysis button.
Team score
In an ideal world, we want to have the least amount of splits of a team during a session. That means if the team High Flyers has 14 athletes, we only want them to be in 2 rotations of 7. If, however, they are spread across 3,4, or even 5 rotations, the coach(es) will have a very hard time attending to their athletes. In the same light, the athletes will have full access to their coach, their most trusted helper at the most important time: competition.
The "Team score" is therefore an important metric to assess the quality of experience for athletes and coaches. A 100% score means that all of the teams in your session have not been spread across rotations any more than they need. If, as in the example above, the 14 High Flyers were split into 3 rotations, then we would not get 100%.
Category score
Just as the "Team score" quantifies the experience of athletes and coaches, the "Category score" quantifies the experience of the judges. In general, we want to avoid judges changing rules within a rotation (athlete to athlete) as much as possible. Changing rules will not only be mentally demanding for a judge but also fatiguing and therefore may produce more errors in judgement.
The "Category score" is a metric that measures how spread out each category is. A 100% means that each category in the session has only been assigned to the minimum number of rotations needed. Take, for example, the category Level 5 with 20 athletes. If we divide this category into 3 rotations of 7,7, and 6, we'll get 100%. Otherwise, if divided it into four rotations of 5, then points will be deducted from the total "Category score".
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