⌛Sessions
Learn what a sessions are and what they’re used for.
Overview
Sessions are time slots within schedules. They are how you can assign athletes to rotations, and how judges can be assigned to judge those athletes. Within sessions, you have some parameters such as its name, time range and description. Sessions also include a timeline to describe where and when the athletes arrive, warm up and compete. Furthermore, they have a section to create judge's tables, which is how you can assign judges to enter scores. Finally, they have a list of rotations which represents not only the apparatus athletes will compete on, but also describes which athletes and in what order will they compete.
Parameters
Name
The publicly visible name of this session. Typically organizers will create sessions sequentially such as Session 1, Session 2, Session 3 and on.
If there is only one category competing in this session, we recommend you add it to the name after the session number. Furthermore, if there are specific subdivisions we also recommend appending " | Subdiv. #".
Name examples:
Session 1
Session 2 ~ Level 3-4
Session 3 ~ Level 5U13 | Subdiv. 2
Day and time range
You can decide when the session is during its given schedule. You can select the day and the range of times the session will endure. For example, you may set the session to be October 15th, 2023, and the time range to be 08:00-11:00.
The session's time range must be within the scheduled daytime range, with a pre-specified beginning and ending of each day.
Description
An optional description of this session. We recommend you add any information specific to this session, such as if it's on Plateau A or B, or the different categories that will be competing. Providing this additional information can help parents find their children's, and coaches find their athletes' competition much easier.
Timeline
A session's timeline acts as directions for coaches, parents, judges, and anyone else attending the event. The timeline consists of sections, which are time slots.
Sections
Sections are time slots in the session's timeline that allow you to specify what's supposed to be going on in the gym. Of course, reality is messy and the sections are suggestive. For each section, you can specify the name, start and end time, colour, and description.
Most organizers will create warm-up and competition sections based on the expected time of the longest rotation. What that means is that they will calculate the estimated duration of each rotation using the categories' average warm-up and competition parameters. They can then create a warm-up and competition section in the timeline based on the longest rotation.
Here are some suggestions for sections you can add:
Arrival
Warm-up
March in
Competition
Awards
Competitions & athletes
With Gym Art Meets, to assign athletes you first have to add competitions to the session. You can only add one subdivision (or day of comp.) for each given competition. That means if you have a competition with two subdivisions, you'll need two sessions.
The athletes you can assign to rotations are precisely the ones that are part of the competitions you've added. In other words, if you add the first subdivision of the Level 4 competition, only the athletes in that first subdivision will be available to you to add to your rotations. This filtering of athletes is designed to reduce mistakes and help you make sure you've assigned all athletes.
Filtering of competitions
We've gone the extra mile to make sure you can only assign a subdivision of competition once to a session. That means if you've already assigned Subdivision 1 of Level 3 to Session 3, it will not be available to add to any other sessions. This small but helpful feature will help you make sure you've assigned all your athletes to sessions.
Rotations
Rotations are the final piece to the puzzle of scheduling a gymnastics meet. Since they can be rather intricate, we've created a separate guide just for them. Learn more there:
🔄RotationsJudge's tables
Each session has a list of judge's tables which contain the different judges you've added to them. These tables can then be assigned to rotations in your session.
Judge's tables are only useful for live scoring features. If you're dealing only with scheduling, you can ignore this part.
We've created a dedicated guide for judge's tables, as they too can be intricate.
✍️Judge’s tablesExample
We come back to our example schedule from the World Championships ~ WAG Senior meet. In this scenario, we will consider the first two sessions of the gymnastics meet.
Session 1
Name: Session 1 ~ Senior | Subdiv. 1
Date and times: October 14th, 2023, 08:00-11:00
Sections:
Arrival: 08:00 - 08:05
Warm-up: 08:10 - 08:40
March in: 08:40 - 09:00
Competition: 09:00 - 11:00
Competitions: Subdivision 1 from our WAG Senior competition
Session 2
Name: Session 2 ~ Senior | Subdiv. 2
Date and times: October 14th, 2023, 12:00-15:00
Sections:
Arrival: 12:00 - 12:05
Warm-up: 12:10 - 12:40
March in: 12:40 - 13:00
Competition: 13:00 - 17:00
Competitions: Subdivision 2 from our WAG Senior competition
Rotations and judge's tables are omitted, see their guides for examples.