One complaint I frequently hear from gymnastics fans is that the top teams receive a “leotard bonus” when they compete. There is a perception that competing for a top team gives the gymnast an unfair advantage–not just in recruitment and athlete resources but also in judging.
In this article, I wanted to see if competing for a more well-known or historically successful school results in more overscoring. To do this, I looked at athletes that had transferred and compared their routines while competing for two different teams.
To try to be as accurate as possible, I only watched the routines once at full speed to come up with my score. This is different from some of my other articles, where I try to find every possible deduction. Instead, I tried to be as realistic as possible in taking college deductions as they are standard in NCAA gymnastics.
I used a system to identify teams that were over or underscored as compared to my score. If my score is within one tenth of the average, I rated it as “just right.” If I am within range of both judges’ scores, but more than one tenth from the average, it’s rated as “overscored” or “underscored.” If my score is out of range from one of the scores, it was rated as “very underscored” or “very…
