🥇Competitions
Learn what a competitions are and what they’re used for.
Overview
Competitions are how you can assign athletes to compete against each other. They only have athletes from one category, which can be further partitioned using subdivisions and can have multiple competition days. We provide tools to rapidly generate and evenly distribute athletes amongst subdivisions in an optimal way.
Structure
Competitions are groupings of athletes from a single category competing against each other. Typically, for a qualification or one-time competition, all athletes from a category will compete.
Assigning a competition to a session (which is the prerequisite to assigning athletes to rotations) requires you to select a subdivision and day of competition. Only one subdivision/day can be assigned per session meaning you cannot have two subdivisions from the same competition in one session.
Subdivisions
Subdivisions are the sub-dividing (or partitioning) 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. Each subdivision then can be added to sessions.
You can't add multiple subdivisions from the same competition to one session. You'll need at least as many sessions as subdivisions to accommodate the competition.
Using subdivisions is very important when it comes to scheduling well-balanced sessions. Each competition can only be assigned to one subdivision per 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 at the same time!
Assigning athletes
There is indeed an optimal way to assign athletes across athletes, and we've made special tools so that you don't have to think about it. Although the details are provided in the dedicated guide, we outline here the general outline.
When organizing a session with athletes, it's helpful to divide them evenly across subdivisions. This will make it easier to organize rotations during the session. However, since it's difficult to predict exactly what those rotations will be like, it's best to group athletes with the team and the same coaches. This will ensure that teams and athletes stay together, and won't be divided amongst different sessions. By grouping athletes in this way, it will also allow teams to travel together.
Competition days
Competition days are a way to allow athletes to compete more than one time for one competition. This will result in their final scores and rankings being determined based on the sum of their competition days. In general, most competitions only have one day so this setting can be ignored.
Similar to subdivisions, and for obvious reasons, you can't assign two different days of competition to the same session: that would defeat the purpose of having multiple days.
Most competitions are only one day. If you don't need to consider multiple competition days you can set the day count to 1 and safely forget about this feature
Generating competitions
We provide a tool that allows you to automatically generate and assign athletes into subdivisions. Using this algorithm, 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.
Adding comps to a session
Competitions are intended to be added to sessions. You can add multiple competitions to a single session, but the software prevents you from adding the same competition more than once. Additionally, you cannot add competitions from the same category to a session.
For example, you may have Level 1-4 competing in session one since each competition only has eight athletes so they can all fit in six rotations.
Total number of sessions
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.
Example
Consider two different competitions during the Women's Artistic Senior World Championships: qualifications and all-around finals.
Qualifications
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 in this WAG case 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.
Comp. Days: In this case, there is only one day of competition for one athlete. That means each athlete has one chance to show off their skills on all the apparatus!
Required sessions: With eight subdivisions and one competition we need 8*1 = 8 total sessions for this competition
All-Around finals
In this scenario, we'll consider a fictional all-around final that plays out over two days for educational purposes.
Athletes: We only take the top 24 Senior athletes with the highest all-around score in the qualifications round.
Subdivisions: We only need 1 subdivision to accommodate all athletes
Since in this case, we don't prioritize keeping teams together, we can fit all 4*6 = 24 in one subdivision
Each rotation will therefore have 6 athletes
Comp. Days: In our special case, we add two days of competition
All 24 athletes will compete twice on all apparatus.
The winner is the gymnast with the highest score summed across both days of competition.
Required sessions: Since we have one subdivision and two days of competition, we need 2*1 = 2 sessions for this competition.