Week nine brought one of the busiest gymnastics weekends of the year, with 17 teams competing more than once. Rest time can be crucial for a gymnast, but so is preparing for the postseason where a team must compete twice in a weekend to advance. How do teams perform with minimal rest time? Do we see lower scores with less rest? Do we see more gymnasts being rested when a double is on the schedule? We dove into the data to find out.
Score Differences
For this analysis, we looked at all regular-season meets going back 10 years. We excluded postseason meets because, on average, they occur closer together and team strategy may be different at that point in the season.
First, we calculated how many days there are between meets and found that it’s most common for there to be exactly seven days between meets, though they do often fall six or eight days apart, for example, if a meet is on a Friday one week but Saturday the next, or vice versa. According to our data, we found that having two days between meets is the most common spacing for a double-meet weekend. However, we are considering one to three days between meets as qualifying as a double for this analysis. Teams occasionally have more than 14 days between meets. For our purposes we’re grouping all of those…
