Neutral-site meets are an exciting part of each season. Some neutral-site meets bring top teams to areas that don’t see college gymnastics come through town, while others are nearby campuses with a team but provide a unique and exciting atmosphere. Scores from neutral-site meets count toward NQS as away meets, no matter the distance from home. We wanted to know if teams close to home have an advantage at these meets.
Between 2016 and 2025, we identified over 140 neutral-site, regular-season meets. This included meets put on by external organizers and invitationals, including Metroplex, the Sprouts Farmers Market Collegiate Quad, and Super 16, as well as conference meets that were held at neutral locations and not at a team’s home gym, including the SEC and Pac-12 conference meets. We analyzed meets with at least one “home” team, that is, teams located within 100 miles of the meet. This left us with over 80 meets with nearly 350 team scores. Of these, most meets had one team within 100 miles of the meet (about 70%), but some meets had two (about 20%) or three teams within 100 miles (about 10%).
First, we looked at team scores alongside the distance between teams’ campuses and meet locations. For each meet, we calculated the as-the-crow-flies distance in miles between the host city and each team’s campus. Overall, as mileage increased, scores trended higher. However, teams that traveled both near and far achieved high and low scores. This trend doesn’t seem to tell the entire story, especially since most teams traveled fewer than 500 miles from campus, and the trend is not as strong when looking at only those teams.
Next, we looked at the winners of these meets. Here, we found that most winning teams were competing close to home. Only 33% of teams came from less than 100 miles away, but these teams won 61% of neutral-site meets. Teams traveling 100 miles or more accounted for 66% of the competition but only won 39% of the time.
Another way to look at this is the percentage of teams in each distance category that won their meet. Teams that came from less than 50 miles away overwhelmingly won the highest proportion of their meets, winning more than half of their neutral site competitions. Utah was responsible for about one-in-four of these nearby wins. Teams from other distances won 13-18% of their meets.
Lastly, we revisited the trend between team score and distance traveled, but only for our neutral-site home teams. The chart below zooms in on team scores by miles traveled for teams that were less than 100 miles away from the meet. We did not find a strong trend here. This means that although teams that traveled less than 50 miles were more likely to win their meet, their scores were not much higher than teams that traveled 50 to 99 miles.
All in all, we’ve seen that teams that compete in neutral-site meets close to home do tend to win more frequently. Last season, 11 teams competed in a neutral-site meet that was within 50 miles of their campus. Two teams, Utah and BYU, each competed in two neutral-site meets very close by at the Maverick Center in West Valley City, Utah. Utah won both meets.
We already have a number of neutral-site home meets to look forward to in 2026. LSU will compete at the Podium Challenge in Baton Rouge. Utah will compete in the Maverick Center three times at the Sprouts Farmers Market Collegiate Quad, Best of Utah, and the Big 12 Championship.
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Article by Jill Walsh
I think its important t to point out that particularly in t Maverick Center meets many of the teams we ranked significantly lower than Utah. teams such as Utah State. bYU. and the lower ranked Big 12 teams cannot expect to win over Utah. I’m sure if other teams anchor venues would like to go to the expense of purchasing podium equipment Utah would gladly travel to another site. also the National Championship always in Ft Worth (a city I love and always have a great time) is far easier to a cess for Oklahoma LSU and Florida. their crowd sizes are always larger than the other teams competing. maybe nationals need to be relocated