With the upcoming college season rapidly approaching, the time has come to create your fantasy gymnastics drafts. We previously published reference datasets for both returning gymnasts and freshmen, as well as sample drafts and our custom draft tool, which are great starting points. But if you’re still wavering on some finer points, this article aims to provide you with some key statistics to consider when finalizing your drafts.
Quantity of Scores
Lineup Frequency
At a high level, a great draft pick is a gymnast who offers a high quantity of high-quality scores. In gymnastics, the quantity of scores is most often measured in terms of lineup frequency–that is, the percentage of meets a gymnast competes in. Thankfully, Road to Nationals provides an easy way to visualize this statistic. For instance, the lineup frequency of all Air Force gymnasts in the 2024 season is available here.
Note, however, that this chart considers every meet in which at least one gymnast from the team competed in its denominator. Taking the Air Force example, meets 12 and 15 correspond to meets to which only certain gymnasts from the team qualified as individual competitors. Moreover, some teams may occasionally rest their top gymnasts during the regular season, especially if they are dealing with nagging injuries. So, a gymnast not having a 100% lineup frequency is not necessarily a deal-breaker, particularly if your league is configured to allow for alternates (as opposed to a five-up-five-count scenario).
Impact Difference
Of course, just because a gymnast made lineups relatively often in one season does not guarantee they will make lineups again the following season, as incoming freshmen and transfers may slot into lineups in place of them. Without doing a team-by-team analysis of offseason acquisitions, one potential way of gauging a returning gymnast’s chances of making lineups is by understanding their impact difference in the previous year. This is calculated by Road to Nationals for each gymnast and event on a meet-by-meet basis, as the difference between the gymnast’s score on the event and the team’s lowest score on the event.
In general, gymnasts with higher impact differences are more likely to remain in their teams’ lineups. For instance, the median of the median impact difference achieved in 2023 by returning gymnasts with lineup frequencies of at least 90% in the 2024 season was about 0.125 on vault, 0.163 on bars, 0.256 on beam, and 0.150 on floor.
Quality of Scores
When evaluating the quality of a gymnast’s scores, NQS, along with season/career averages and highs, are often the first metrics come to mind. These are available in our previously published dataset for returning gymnasts.
However, these are aggregate metrics that describe a gymnast’s entire season or career, while crafting lineups from the fantasy team you draft will be a week-to-week exercise during the season. Getting a sense of how a gymnast’s scores vary around these metrics can be helpful, which is where the individual consistency charts on Road to Nationals come in.
These charts provide an easy way to visualize how a gymnast’s scores fluctuate and to approximate a “hit rate” specific to your preferences. For example, if you aim to only count scores of 9.800 or higher, you can estimate the fraction of points on the chart above that mark.
Assuming a league with the maximum size of 20, which does not use any draft themes that substantially restricts the pool of high-quality scores available, the table below shows potential minimum cutoffs to aim for on each event. These cutoffs were calculated as the 200th (for making lineups) and 100th (for being among the five counting scores) highest scores per event for each regular season week in 2024, taking high scores for teams/gymnasts in the case of doubles/triples.
| Week | Making Fantasy Lineups | |||
| Vault | Bars | Beam | Floor | |
| 1 | 9.725 | 9.675 | 9.575 | 9.700 |
| 2 | 9.750 | 9.775 | 9.775 | 9.825 |
| 3 | 9.775 | 9.800 | 9.775 | 9.825 |
| 4 | 9.775 | 9.775 | 9.750 | 9.825 |
| 5 | 9.775 | 9.775 | 9.775 | 9.825 |
| 6 | 9.775 | 9.800 | 9.800 | 9.850 |
| 7 | 9.775 | 9.775 | 9.775 | 9.825 |
| 8 | 9.800 | 9.800 | 9.800 | 9.850 |
| 9 | 9.800 | 9.800 | 9.825 | 9.850 |
| 10 | 9.800 | 9.825 | 9.825 | 9.850 |
| 11 | 9.825 | 9.800 | 9.825 | 9.850 |
| 12 | 9.800 | 9.800 | 9.800 | 9.850 |
| Week | Counting Score in Fantasy Gymnastics | |||
| Vault | Bars | Beam | Floor | |
| 1 | 9.800 | 9.825 | 9.775 | 9.800 |
| 2 | 9.825 | 9.850 | 9.825 | 9.875 |
| 3 | 9.850 | 9.850 | 9.850 | 9.875 |
| 4 | 9.850 | 9.850 | 9.825 | 9.875 |
| 5 | 9.850 | 9.850 | 9.850 | 9.900 |
| 6 | 9.850 | 9.850 | 9.850 | 9.900 |
| 7 | 9.850 | 9.850 | 9.850 | 9.875 |
| 8 | 9.850 | 9.875 | 9.850 | 9.900 |
| 9 | 9.850 | 9.875 | 9.875 | 9.875 |
| 10 | 9.850 | 9.875 | 9.875 | 9.900 |
| 11 | 9.875 | 9.875 | 9.875 | 9.900 |
| 12 | 9.850 | 9.875 | 9.875 | 9.900 |
Hopefully, the statistics discussed above will prove helpful as you sort through your final draft decisions for the upcoming season. Happy drafting!
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Article by Dara Tan
