🔄Rotations
Learn what a rotations are and what they’re used for.
Overview
Rotations are the assignments of athletes within a session. Each rotation represents an ordered group of athletes that will compete in each apparatus. When specifying rotations within a session, you are specifying the initial apparatus and the order of the athletes, as well as the different apparatus available to compete on. Finally, you can also specify the judge's tables that will be judging the group of athletes on the different apparatus.
When a session plays out, athletes and their coaches will go to their initial rotation and once everyone is done competing everyone will move over to the next apparatus and compete there.
Parameters
Rotations in the context of Gym Art Meets contain nested information. Here we will explain the different data stored within each rotation, and what it implies.
Athlete list
The athletes assigned to a rotation represent a group that will be competing alongside one another on each apparatus. They will begin on the apparatus of the rotation, and then progress to other apparatus to complete their other routines.
Generally, organizers prefer to keep the competition time of rotations around 20 minutes long, so they won't add any more than 7 or 8 athletes to a rotation.
The athletes in a rotation do not have to be from the same category or the same team. For example, we may have three athletes from the High Flyer team in Level 2 and five athletes from the Pointed Toes team in Level 3.
Athlete order
The order of the athletes is the initial order in which they will compete at the first apparatus. Subsequent apparatus will change their order by 'bumping'. This means that when at apparatus two, the second will compete first, the third will compete second, and the first athlete will compete last. Similarly, on the third apparatus, the third athlete will compete first, the fourth second, the first second-last and the second last.
A rotation's apparatus
Each rotation in a session specifies an apparatus. This apparatus represents two things:
The initial starting place for the group athletes
An apparatus that is to be completed by all athlete groups
In other words, each rotation represents the initial starting place, but also a future destination of the athletes in the session. This means that if you want to have an all-around competition on six apparatus but only have three rotations, you need to keep the three empty apparatus in the session's rotation list. Removing them will remove those apparatus from the competition, preventing the athletes from competing on those apparatus during this session.
You also have control over the order of apparatus, and can optionally add break apparatus to your list of apparatus. Learn more about dealing with the apparatus-rotation dynamic in this guide.
Apparatus order
Since a rotation represents the starting place for athletes, we also include a future apparatus order they will follow under the details section of the tile. This list represents the order in which the athletes will compete on the apparatus, starting with the apparatus in the top left corner.
Judge's tables
Each rotation also has a list of judges' tables. This list tells you which judge's tables will be judging the rotation's group of athletes on what apparatus. This feature is only useful if you are planning on using the live scoring features of Gym Art Meets, and can be ignored otherwise. We've created a dedicated guide for judge's tables and how to assign them here.
Assigning athletes
One of the major tasks of an organizer is deciding how to divide the athletes from a session's competitions evenly and equitably into the rotations. Not only do we not want coaches to be running around to different apparatus and not properly tending to their athletes but we also want to reduce the amount of rule changes judges have to go through from athlete to athlete. Finally, how can we do this while dividing 23 athletes into 6 rotations?
This problem is non-trivial and poses a great challenge to someone new to scheduling. We have created a tool that will automatically assign the athletes rotations in a matter of seconds. Not only is it fast, but the optimality of the athletes', coaches', and judges' experience is mathematically guaranteed.
You can learn more about this tool and how to use it from its dedicated guide.
Example
Consider the first session from our ongoing World Championships ~ WAG Senior example. In this session, we will need four rotations, each with five athletes (for simplicity). However, to spice up this example, we can imagine that we have 23 athletes instead of 20, meaning we can't divide them into groups of five across the apparatus. Furthermore, the three extra athletes are from the same team.
Approach 1
In this approach, we use the pre-generated four rotations for the four apparatus in Women's Gymnastics. With the athlete assignment tool, we automatically assign the athletes across the rotations. This results in the teams being grouped as much as possible, and the athletes being in groups of sizes 6, 6, 6, and 5.
However, in this case, we'll necessarily have to divide some teams up. This means if we don't use the assignment tool we'll have to play around with the various ways to combine the teams that produce the least amount of headache for the coaches.
Approach 2
Instead of using only four apparatus, we can create a broken apparatus so that the extra 3 athletes (from the same team) can all be together. All-in-all this creates five rotations, each with a group of athletes of sizes 5, 5, 5, 5, and 3.