NCAA gymnastics teams travel a median of 6,700 miles each season. This is the equivalent of a round trip between Anchorage and New York City. We found that different conferences had travel schedules that looked very different from one another, and even within a conference, some teams rack up thousands of more miles on the road than others do. With gymnasts spending hours on the way to meets, we wanted to know if these tough travel schedules affect scores. Does traveling farther result in lower scores?
Methodology
To find out, we pulled scores for meets in 2022, 2023, and 2024 and classified each meet as home, away, or neutral-site. We excluded neutral site meets for this analysis. For each away meet, we calculated the as-the-crow-flies distance in miles between the host campus and the away teams’ campuses. Home meets were assigned a distance value of zero miles. These distances are approximate because some teams may have multi-meet weekends that involve traveling from one away meet to another away meet nearby, rather than starting all travel from their home campus.
For each event in each meet, we calculated the mean score deviation. This measures how much a team’s mean, or average, score on an event differs from the team’s mean score for the entire season….
