Earlier this month, we put the long-held belief that scores rise during postseason two-session meets to the test and concluded that it would be difficult to argue against it. Thankfully, the impact of this finding on team qualifications is rather limited as teams only compete with other teams in their session to qualify to the next postseason round. However, a single individual qualifier to nationals is selected per event across both sessions at regionals, which begs the question: do individuals have a better chance at qualifying to nationals from the second session at regionals? We looked at data from 2021 to 2025 to answer this question.
To start, we looked at the number of qualifiers by event and session. As shown in the chart below, there were substantially more all-around, vault, and bars qualifiers out of Session 2 as compared to Session 1. On the other hand, and contrary to the proposed question, slightly more gymnasts in the first session qualified on beam and floor over the past five years.
Focusing solely on qualifiers may omit part of the story–the process for naming individual qualifiers is more complicated than for teams, as gymnasts on qualifying teams are excluded from consideration, and tie-breaking procedures must be applied. As such,…
