🤸‍♂️Athletes
Learn what athletes (gymnasts) are and how you can manage them.
Overview
Athletes, or gymnasts, are the whole reason we're here! They're the individuals competing on the apparatus during the meet, sticking (hopefully) the landings, and receiving (of course) the perfect 10's.
In the context of Gym Art Meets, athletes are necessarily part of a category and a team and have a unique identifier. They have other details, required and some optional, that you can use to classify them.
Assigning athletes
Once you've created your athletes and successfully associated them with their categories and teams, you'll be able to assign the athletes to subdivisions of competitions and subsequently rotations in sessions.
Competitions
To add athletes to a schedule, you must first add them to the subdivisions of a competition. You can learn more about what competitions are and their structure from their guide. In short, a competition represents a group of athletes from one category that will be competing against each other. If not all athletes can fit in a single session (i.e. cannot all compete in the venue at the same time) then we assign and create multiple subdivisions (or subsets) of athletes within that competition.
You can automatically add athletes to subdivisions using the Gym Art Meets algorithms, which will automatically distribute them evenly and prioritize keeping teams together. After they've been assigned, either automatically or manually, you can move then move on to adding each of the subdivisions to different sessions.
Sessions & rotations
Once athletes have been assigned to competitions and you've started to create your schedule, you can assign athletes to rotations within a session. You can learn more about how schedules are organized and the specifics of session structure from their respective guides.
In essence, we want to assign our subdivision of athletes amongst the apparatus of competition in a way that's ideal for everyone. That means we don't want coaches running around between apparatus, leaving athletes to jump to the bar themselves or have another coach set the vault board for them.
Rotation assignment is a difficult and precarious task that typically requires a lot of experience and intuition. Fortunately, whether you're a seasoned expert or just starting to organize meets, Gym Art Meets provides a powerful tool to automatically assign athletes to rotations within seconds. Using this tool you can confidently know that the athletes are assigned such that their experience (and that of the coaches and judges as well) is optimal.
You can learn more about the different tools we offer to automatically assign athletes to subdivisions and rotations from their respective guides.
Parameters
Required
First and last name
Category identifier
The unique id of a category you've created such as SENR
Team identifier
The unique ID of a team you've created such as HIFLYR
Date of birth
You can also provide only their year of birth e.g. 2010
Unique athlete identifier
AKA affiliation number
If the identifier is not provided, Gym Art Meets will automatically create one as it can be cumbersome to come up with 100 unique identifiers!
If you already have an athlete's affiliation number and are confident it's unique amongst the other athletes in your meet, you can certainly use it for the unique identifier!
Optional
Athlete number
Could be the bib number, e.g. 104 or 641
Registration date
The date they confirmed registration for this meet
Coach identifiers
A list of the unique identifiers of this athlete's coaches
For example: "C123, 8797, 81023"
Example
Consider our fictional athlete Jane Smith.
She's part of the team High Flyers so we set her team identifier to HIFLYR
She's competing in the Senior category so we set her category identifier to SENR.
We set her athlete identifier to her affiliation number with the province/state federation. For example 123123123
Her bib number is 101 so we set her athlete number to 101
She has two coaches with unique identifiers of 123 and 456 so we set her coach identifiers value to "123, 456"