Earlier this month, we put the long-held belief that scores rise during postseason two-session meets to the test and concluded that it would be difficult to argue against it. Thankfully, the impact of this finding on team qualifications is rather limited as teams only compete with other teams in their session to qualify to the next postseason round. However, a single individual qualifier to nationals is selected per event across both sessions at regionals, which begs the question: do individuals have a better chance at qualifying to nationals from the second session at regionals? We looked at data from 2021 to 2025 to answer this question.
Distribution of Qualifiers
To start, we looked at the number of qualifiers by event and session. As shown in the chart below, there were substantially more all-around, vault, and bars qualifiers out of Session 2 as compared to Session 1. On the other hand, and contrary to the proposed question, slightly more gymnasts in the first session qualified on beam and floor over the past five years.
Gymnasts Within Qualifying Range
Focusing solely on qualifiers may omit part of the story–the process for naming individual qualifiers is more complicated than for teams, as gymnasts on qualifying teams are excluded from consideration, and tie-breaking procedures must be applied. As such, to get a broader picture, we then considered gymnasts within the qualifying range, i.e. gymnasts who, for a given regionals site and event, scored at least as high in the second round as the eventual qualifier. The bar chart below shows the distribution of such gymnasts across sessions and rotations, for the entire period of interest. The dashed horizontal line indicates the mean number of gymnasts, across all sessions and rotations.
All else being equal, you would expect the qualifiers out of each rotation to hover around the mean. However as shown, three of the four rotations in Session 1 fall below the mean, with Rotation 4 only exceeding it slightly. While in Session 2 only one rotation, Rotation 3, falls below the mean. These initial findings do appear to suggest a benefit to individual qualification hopefuls competing in the later session, and particularly those competing in the last rotation: Session 2 Rotation 4 has the largest number gymnasts within qualifying range at 75, which is over 25% more than the next largest at 59, in Session 2 Rotation 1.
To account for the possibility that gymnasts in the second session, and in particular the fourth rotation of that session, were simply stronger on their respective events, we next looked at each gymnast’s score in the second round of regionals, relative to their NQS that season. The chart below visualizes the distribution of the score difference, calculated as regionals score minus NQS, by session and rotation.
The width of the pink area indicates the frequency at which a given score difference occurred. In most sessions and rotations, the majority of this area lies above the dashed horizontal line at zero, indicating that most gymnasts within qualifying range across all sessions and rotations achieved regionals scores above their NQS.
That said, there still appears to be a slight difference between sessions. In particular, the lower quartile of score differences, marked by the bottom edge of each box plot, lies below the zero line for three of the four rotations in Session 1, but at or even above the zero line for three of the four rotations in Session 2. This suggests that a larger fraction of gymnasts saw a boost from their NQS to their score at regionals in the second session, as compared to the first.
Contextualizing with Percentiles
To incorporate further context into this analysis, we looked at the performance over the season of each gymnast within qualifying range, relative to that of all other gymnasts who competed on the same event at the same regional. To do so, we calculated the NQS percentiles for gymnasts within qualifying range, where the X-th percentile indicates that they had an NQS on an event that was better than X% of all gymnasts who competed on that event, at the same regional, regardless of session. The charts below show the distribution of these NQS percentiles. A percentile of 100 means the gymnast had the highest NQS of the competitors at their location and was the most likely to advance. The values of zero correspond to gymnasts without NQS values, who made up less than 10% of gymnasts in each event and session.
Recall that the width of the pink area indicates the frequency of a given value–in this case, a given NQS percentile. All else being equal, we expect a higher frequency of high NQS percentiles, as these are the expected qualifiers at a given regional should their team not advance. This generally holds true across events and sessions, as the pink area is top-heavy in each case. We should also expect the distributions to be similar across sessions if the chances of advancing are equivalent across sessions.
Looking at the shapes of the pink areas, the distribution of NQS percentiles was most similar between sessions on beam, potentially because gymnasts with higher NQS percentiles tended to be able to produce strong routines with greater consistency, allowing them to achieve higher scores at regionals. In contrast, the distributions on bars and especially floor were quite different: high percentiles were observed more frequently in Session 2 than Session 1 on bars, and substantially more frequently in Session 1 than Session 2 on floor. This implies a higher frequency of “unexpected” individual qualifiers out of Session 2 on floor following the hypothesized trend. However contrary to common belief, more unexpected qualifiers have come out of Session 1 on bars.
Conclusion
Based on the findings above, it appears at first glance that the tendency for scores to rise during postseason two-session meets could have impacted individual qualification chances, with gymnasts in the second session potentially having a slight advantage. However, this advantage, if it exists, is not particularly large, and may not apply equally across events, as indicated both by looking strictly at the eventual qualifiers, and by considering all gymnasts within qualifying range. Ultimately, while competing in the second session might give gymnasts a slight scoring boost as concluded in our previous article, stronger evidence would be needed to make the case that rising scores from one session to the next offers an indisputable, across-the-board edge for those hoping to punch their ticket to nationals as individuals.
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Article by Dara Tan
