Fantasy Gymnastics Recap: Week 3 - Movin' On Up

Thanks to Maggie Holmgren for the picture!

Week 3 was the best so far, and not just because I got the highest score yet. At this point, I'm still expecting my athletes to improve each week, as they settle into the season and get past those early nerves of new routines and half a year off. No, this week was good for my fantasy team because I scored only 0.25 points lower than my possible high, which means my statistics and predictions are working!

Of course, there is no way to fully predict what's going to happen. A gymnast can get injured in warm-up and not compete or have a rough week with multiple falls - even if she's the best on the team. That's why 0.25 is so impressive. All my girls performed as well as I expected them to. In fact, my overall score was better than I expected. That is probably because I go for a low estimate when calculating the expected score.

Since it's the 3rd week, I figured it was time to give you a glimpse into how I calculate each expected score, so that I can start building my line-ups each week. The way Fantasy Gym works, I have 20 gymnasts, and each week choose 8 per event. Of those 8 the 5 highest scores count. Today, I'm going to tell you about Hit Average and Consistency

Hit Average

The Fantasy Gymnastics website gives you each athletes' average score and most recent score on an event, but this takes into account every performance - including falls. I wanted a number that represented how the gymnast scores when she performs as expected without falling, or hits her routine. To do this, I calculate the ratio of hit routines to total competitions. Then I find the average of just those hit scores.

For example, Georgia Dabritz (Utah), my superstar on bars has competed 3 times and hit her routine all 3 of those times. Her hit percentage is 100%. However, Lindsay Offutt (Pitt) has hit only 2 of 3, for a hit percentage of 66.7%. Using just averages, Lindsay wouldn't make my line-up, but when I take into account her hit average, she does.

Consistency

High hit scores are great, but I need to make sure that each week I have 5 consistent scores to count each week. I don't want to be counting falls, and I especially don't want to count anymore zeroes after week 1. To determine consistency I calculate two different values: first, I get the standard deviation of all the routines competed. Luckily, I don't have to calculate that by hand since my spreadsheet does the work for me. The second value I calculate is hit range, which tells me how much the scores for a single gymnast can differ week to week - not including major errors.

Maybe in a future week I'll tell you how I calculate hit average together with consistency to come up with my final line-up. Or maybe I'll keep that secret to myself.

Around the League

So, it's not a good recap unless I talk a little about how gymnasts performed outside of my team. Here were some of this week's superstars, and girls I wish I had to pull my scores up even higher:

• Elizabeth Price (Stanford) pulled out a 10 on Vault and a 9.925 on Bars
• Brittany Rogers (Georgia) got a 9.975 on Bars this week
• Kytra Hunter (Florida) performs a gorgeous Floor routine for a 9.975, and the same on Vault
• Brenna Dowell (Oklahoma) got the NCAA's first 10 on Bars of the season!
• Ashley Lambert (Nebraska) got her second 10 in a row on Vault