How a Gymnastics Competition Works

Hello Friends,

So as I have previously mentioned, I am going to be blogging about all of my competitions or "meets" this year, so I thought you might want some background info.  A gymnastics competition is referred to as a "meet". Don't ask me why, it just is.  So in my level, we have around 5-6 meets per competition season, plus state meet, and if we qualify, regionals.  Normally, all of our meets are in Utah except for regionals.  Regionals is out of state, last year it was in Arizona, and this year it will be in California!

Every year, around the end of October, we receive a "meet schedule".  It pretty much tells us what meets we are going to that competition season and when.  My meet schedule for this season looks like this...

My competition schedule.

Competition season for gymnastics is usually from December-May.

So now into how a meet works.
There are two parts to a gymnastics meet.  Individual awards and Team awards.  Individual awards are First, Second, Third place for one gymnast.  The top three scores from one team are averaged and entered into team awards.  Team awards are First, Second, Third place for the entire team.  So there's a basic explanation of how awards works.  Now onto some technical stuff…

In gymnastics there are four events, beam, bars, floor and vault. Each gymnast competes every event and receives a score from the judges out of 10.  A gymnasts score starts from 10 and for every mistake they make in their routine, the get deductions.  (I know, super positive right?) On every event there are two judges, they each give the athlete a score out of 10, and then their two scores are averaged to make your final score.  You get one try for your routine on every event, except for vault.  For vault, you get to do two vaults, whichever vault scores higher is the one that stays.  There are five sections for individual awards; bars, beam, floor, vault and all-around.  All around is where you average all of your scores for all four events.  To win first place on all-around is a HUGE deal!

I do a gymnastics program called Xcel.  There are five levels in Xcel; bronze, silver, gold, platinum and diamond.  This competition season,  here's what my team looks like...

Tasia: Silver 
Brenna: silver
Emery: silver
Kylie: gold
Maggie: gold

Since my whole team is silver and gold, we will most likely be going to meets at around the same times.  The only exception will be when Kylie go to meets where Silver and gold do not compete at the same time.  Unfortunately for me and Kylie, this year, Cody has decided that she no longer wants to do gymnastics, it is very sad because Cody is like my sister,  I don't want to talk too much about it in this post, but basically we don't have a gold team this year.  The reason for this is, in order to have a team, you must have at least three gymnasts competing in the same level.  Me and Kylie will not be competing for team awards this year. ☹

So there you have it, a basic rundown of how these competitions will work.  Sorry if this post was kind of boring, but I thought you might need to know some of this stuff for my future posts about competitions.

Me and Cody last year after winning first place
in team awards. (single tear)

Ta Ta,
Maggie