With the season almost coming to a close, we’re getting ready to say goodbye to some of our all-time favorites. Each year seniors who stole our hearts with their gymnastics throughout their careers perform their final routine before hanging up their grips and graduating from their respective universities. Some of these seniors started off with a bang as impressive freshmen who wowed us all four (or five or six) years. But today, we’re going to focus on those who maybe got a slower start but steadily improved to become the strong gymnasts they are today.
Methodology
To determine the seniors who improved the most over their careers, we compiled scores for all 334 of the current Division I seniors, fifth years, and sixth years. We decided to limit the analysis to just Division I for a fairer comparison of score increases. We then took each gymnast’s average score on every event and their lineup frequency and calculated the increase each year from the previous. Years where the gymnast performed 0 routines were ignored, as we can’t easily differentiate not making lineups from injuries or other outside factors. Finally, we normalized the values and took a weighted average of the increases each year to get our final ranking.
Check out the gymnasts who ranked…
