🥳Meets

Learn what a meet is and about it’s structure.

Overview

Meets are gymnastics events where gymnasts from different categories and teams compete against each other. Depending on how the meet is structured, athletes can compete multiple times, or just once. A meet can range from one day to many depending on the number of sessions needed for all athletes to compete.

What is a meet

A gymnastics meet is an event where athletes from a gymnastics sport come together to compete against one another. It is made up of many different part that all come together into a schedule. Once together and in a schedule, the athletes, coaches and judges know when and where to be. In order to have the best meet possible, we want to organize the smaller parts in way that makes the experience of all the participants, including the spectators, the most enjoyable.

A meet in Gym Art Live only involves one sport: either Women’s Artistic or Men’s Artistic. You can however create multiple meets, each one with different sports.

Parts of a meet

The differents parts of a meet include categories (levels competition), teams (gymnastics clubs, or countries), athletes, coaches, judges, and competitions. All these parts come together in a symphony that is called the schedule.

From the ground up

In order to make the schedule for a meet, we need of course, athletes! And since we need athletes, we also need to create their teams and their categories. What this means is that before creating a schedule, one must first create the categories, teams, athletes, and competitions. These are the components of the meet that will all be put together in order to make a schedule. Once a schedule is finally made, we can then enter the scores of athletes and finally, view the scores live.

Organizing a meet

In order to best organize a meet, we want to make sure that the experience is most enjoyable and lending to that of the athletes. We want them to not feel too rushed, and to not feel overhwelmed. Furthermore, we also want the experience for the spectators to be fun and exciting, as they get to watch the best sport in the world be played.

What this means is that as an organizer, our job is to combine the parts of the meet in such a way that the experience for all is as frictionless as possible. With the Gym Art Meets software, we aim to do exactly that: providing a tool that simplifies and streamlines the process of bringing order to the complex interplay of meet components such that we are sure that the experience is maximally enjoyable to all parties.

Creating a meet

So where do we start? In order to learn about creating a meet using Gym Art Meets, you can consult our guides made especially for this. Here's a general overview of what the process followed when an organizer embarks on the complex task of creating and then managing a meet:

  1. Create categories, teams, and athletes

  2. Organize those athletes into competitions

  3. Create sessions (i.e. time slots) for when those competitions can compete

  4. Publish and share the schedule and scores to all parties concerned

As luck would have, Gym Art Meets provides the ability to do all of those tasks in one place. Our software is desgined to streamline these steps in such a way that starting from preliminary versions of our meet, we can collaborate with others on our team until the meet is polished and ready to share.

The dynamic nature of a meet

As anyone who's organized a meet knows, they are ever changing. Be it athletes dropping out before the event or venue complications arising last minute, we need to stay alert so that in the face of adversity we have the tools and best practices which allow us to pivot effectively. Again, Gym Art Meets is a software that allows administrators and organizers to quickly make changes dynamically so that when a pertubation in our original plan arises, we are able to quickly adapt and implement the best solution

Example

We can consider one of the most famous meets in the gymnastics world: the World Championships for Women's Artistic gymnastics.

  • Categories: Senior

  • Teams: There may be 20 or 30 different countries (teams) participating

  • Athletes: Each country has 5-6 athletes competitng.

  • Competitions: Qualifications, team final, individual all-around final, and apparatus finals.

    • Subdivisions: Since there may be hundreds of athletes from one category in the qualifications competitions, there are multiple subdivisions of athletes who will compete in different sessions typically across one or two days.

  • Schedule: The meet can runbe going on for up to a week, ensuring athletes have enough time to recover between sessions.