Taken athlete by athlete, it can be hard to determine a typical trajectory in a gymnast’s career. We wanted to know, when we break it down by the numbers, are there commonalities across the careers of college gymnasts? To understand when gymnasts typically peak during their college gymnastics career, we asked ourselves many questions. Do gymnasts compete more often or score their highest in a particular class year? Do those patterns differ depending on the event in question? Do specialists tend to peak during different points in their college careers than all–arounders do? Are these patterns similar across teams?
To determine the answers, we looked at two different sets of numbers: lineup appearances and National Qualifying Scores (NQS).
Do gymnasts peak in lineup appearances in a particular class year?
To dive into lineup appearance trends, we looked at individual scores from meets between 2010 and 2022. Since we were interested in when individual performances tend to peak within a collegiate career, we removed gymnasts whose full four years of competition did not fall within the window between 2010 and 2022. For example, a gymnast who was a first-year in 2022 was not included, nor was a gymnast who was a third-year in 2010. Gymnasts whose freshman year was in 2010…
