Posted by Richard
on 6/2/2009, 6:12 pm, in reply to "An Inside Gymnastics article ... "
130.76.32.19
I hope those with the decision making power have been listening to (reading?) the discussions that have been taken place and do not pass the proposals under consideration.
As many others have stated, these two things are not what is wrong with NCAA Women's Gymnastics! As havehrt has noted elsewhere ... judging is one major problem ... but with humans doing the judging that will never be perfect ... and just the fact that it is a judged sport make it different than FB, BaskB, BaseB, etc. ... and harder for the "casual fan" to understand.
The NCAA finals is never going to be anything close to "March Madness" ... LIVE TV or not. It is also not going to be like the Olympics either with (casual) fans anticipating the upcoming Nationals Championships ... without having been following all season!
It needs to start with promotion of the sport from the grassroots level (maybe with some help from USAG or others) ... building interest, as the various coaches have discussed on those gymnastike.org videos, for the local team/sport and regular season of meets! Once that is improved, I don't see the format of Nationals being an issue (if it is in any case).
As far as a system that is confusing for fans ... if a good scoreboard is used (along with a small amount of educating of fans) ... that is not an issue (especially not the idea of noly counting 5 of 6 scores). I was thinking that many (smaller?) schools are not going to be in a position to have a scoreboard system like OSU's ... but I'm sure a system(s) could be put together to provide score information. (Again, counting 5 or 6 ... if you don't have a good scoreboard, you still don't know what is happening!)
Even though I don't particularly care for another of Greg's ideas of counting every team score through-out the season to calculate the RQS ... I think that is a bigger issue as far as fan confusion and the casual fan not understanding the sport (ranking system) ... if it were up to me I would probably go for counting a much higher percentage of the seasons scores ... some number that would allow for the dropping of maybe two scores throughout the season ... maybe allowing for dropping the high as well if that sense. As Greg has shown it wouldn't make a large difference in the rankings ... but I think I saw that it would have been a few (2-3) places (down in some cases) for OSU.
And for the count all 6 scores ... besides what I said about it earlier ... (as others have stated) I think the count 5 of 6 is better for the team atmosphere/chemistry of the sport ... and I think about what I feels like now when a second gymnast falls on a single event (which doesn’t happen often) ... that is how it will feel with this new system for EVERY fall! You think people leave now quickly after the meet is over ... then they will be leaving after the first fall ... or surely after the second!
Go Beavs!!,
Richard
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