Last week, the WCGA Collegiate Judging Issues Committee released a summary of the Judge’s Evaluation System Program to current NCAA judges, detailing how it will be used this season. Below is a summary of some of the new information we have learned since our December article about the SCORE Board was released.
- This year is meant to be a pilot program; the WCGA will use this information and feedback from this season to improve the system in the coming years.
- The SCORE Board will judge a sample of routines from every competition each weekend and will exclude routines that score below a 9.000.
- Judges will receive one to five points based on how close their score is to the two-member SCORE Board judging panel, with judges receiving five points for being within half a tenth and one point for being greater than two tenths from the target score.
- Judges who receive fewer than two points and have agreed to be contacted by the SCORE Board will receive email feedback regarding their routine evaluations. Judges can dispute the SCORE Board’s score up to three times per season, which will be handled by the Supervisor of Officials (SOO).
- To ensure consistency and competency, each of the eight SCORE Board members will review routines on only one event throughout the NCAA season. They all assisted in scoring the base routines the judges use at the beginning of the meets to help standardize their deductions and scoring.
- The SOO will have access to all the judges’ rankings, which will be one of the criteria used in recommending judges for the 2026 postseason.
- Judges are now also being asked to notate and verify when “up to level” deductions are taken, which will soon be incorporated into the score sheet. It is unclear whether or not this score sheet will be available to the public or only the SCORE Board.
Anecdotally, we’ve already noticed some impact of the SCORE Board. No one has scored a perfect 10 through two weeks of competition, and scoring has been notably tighter in several of the early season match-ups. The goal of the SCORE Board and evaluating judges is to try to standardize scoring nationally across conferences and divisions, as well as develop a more objective process for assigning judges to the postseason. At this point, it’s too early to tell what the long-term impact of tighter scoring will be on rankings and records, but I think we can all agree that more accurate scores should be the ultimate goal of any judging reform.
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Article by Rhiannon Franck
Rhiannon Franck is a former national-rated NAWGJ women’s gymnastics judge with over 15 years of USAG judging experience and nine seasons judging NCAA gymnastics. Outside of gymnastics, Franck works at a university as a nursing professor and loves to travel. You can follow her on Instagram and Twitter.
