Judge’s Inquiry: Do Five-Star Recruits Score Better at Top-Ranked Schools?

As a five-star recruit, prospective student-athletes often have their pick of scholarship offers from multiple top teams. Some gymnasts choose to go to a school with a reputation for winning conference and national championships while others might choose a less successful program overall, knowing they can be a star athlete on that team. But does competing on a higher-ranked squad make these gymnasts more successful?

To answer this question, I compared the three-event score of two sets of similarly ranked five-star recruits. I looked at both the NCAA panel’s score and also re-evaluated the routines to see if the judges are more generous to gymnasts on higher-ranked teams. I used the final rankings of the 2024 season and the first performance (with video review available) on each event to try to control for improvements due to the coaching staff. I watched the routines at full speed with no replays and took deductions using college judging norms.

As a reminder, camera angles are often different from the judge’s perspective. This can cause discrepancies between my scores and the panel’s, since they often see deductions I can’t and vice versa. Below is a side-by-side comparison of each set of recruits, with links to the routines I re-scored and the deductions I saw.

Diaz’s scores were two-and-a-half-tenths higher than the NCAA panel compared to Mueller at three-tenths. In hindsight, I probably took more landing deductions than the panel. Mueller performed slightly better based on my scores, but only by a half-tenth, although both were overscored in my opinion.

I would conclude that in this case, being on a higher-ranked team did not significantly impact their scores early in the season. 

Here we see a similar pattern as above, where the athlete on the higher-ranked team performed slightly better and had a slightly higher differential between my score and the panel’s score, but not enough to be significant. Interestingly, Michigan and Oklahoma both had more score inflation compared to Stanford and Ohio State. Michigan and Oklahoma are also teams that have recently won a national title, so perhaps the name recognition or past success of the team has more to do with the success of a five-star recruit than the most recent ranking.

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Article by Rhiannon Franck

Rhiannon Franck is a former nationally 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.