Fantasy Gymnastics Recap: Regular Season

It was an extremely close race in my conference, but at the end of the regular season, I just barely edged out Flipflopologist, 197.694 to 197.693. One one-thousandth of a point! Luckily, my worthy competitor is also moving on to the post-season in one of the ten wild card sports across the league! It's still on.


This past weekend was a break while the NCAA gets ready for regionals. The seeding is all set, and it's time for me to build my post-season line-ups. After all, I have to be in the top fifteen players this week in order to move on to Nationals. So let's take a look at my regular season ups and downs:

Road to Regionals

Last year, I did most of my line-ups based on season averages, but it was when I introduced Hit Percentage and Hit Average into my calculations that I noticed a lower discrepancy between my score and highest potential score on each event.

This year, I took that one step further and calculated what I called "Expected Score." This number took into account season average, hit average, last year's average, standard deviation, hit percentage, to calculate the number I could expect each girl to score on each event.

When I took only the math into account, I did extremely well, usually within only a few tenths, and in week 6, I performed perfectly. However, sometimes I let my heart help with my line-ups: this is where I faltered. I kept putting Austin Sheppard into my Bar line-up before she was ready, and this cost me. In week 8, I scored only a 197.3 out of a possible 197.825, my biggest difference of the second half of the season. I definitely learned to trust the statistics.




Seasonal Superstars

My season MVP has to be none other than the amazing Georgia Dabritz (Utah). Georgia competed All-Around for my team for most of the season, with a break on Beam for only a couple weeks. However, she came back to that event on fire, and was the anchor of my entire team. Georgia's calculated expected scores on her three best events were 9.915 on Floor, 9.925 on Vault, and a crazy 9.948 on Bars!

Another All-Arounder that made line-ups easy to orchestrate each week was Lauren Beers (Alabama). Although her misses were harsh, her hits were incredible contributions to my scores each week. Her expected scores were higher than a 9.85 on all events, but Floor was clearly where she shined with an expected 9.907.


My event specialists included Ciera Perkins on Vault, with an expected 9.894; Chelsea Davis on Bars with 9.881; Sunny Kato on Beam with a 9.876; and Carley Sims on Floor with 9.884.

Trades of Change

Trades were a huge twist this season, and they brought a lot of dynamic to not only my team, but the entire league. Suddenly, injured gymnasts or those not performing up to expectations could be dropped and replaced with a potential 9.9. This was huge for me. Over the course of the season I made the following trades:

• Dropped torn achilles Serena Leong (Cal) for Vault star and all-arounder Camille Drouin-Allaire (GWU)
• Dropped injured Kristen Klarenbach (Arizona) for Floor specialist Chantelle Loehner (EMU)
• Dropped injured Taylor Noonan (CMU) for Bars anchor Jaime Armijo (Southern Utah)
• Dropped low scoring Jordan Hardison (Kent St) for Beam star Laura Mitchell (BGSU)
• Dropped low scoring Taylor Bolender (CMU) to grab healed Taylor Noonan back for Beam

All of these girls made huge contributions to my line-ups on their specialized events, and definitely helped me edge out the competition. While I was sad to see Serena Leong and Kristen Klarenbach go, as they are two gymnasts I love watching, their injuries meant they wouldn't be competing at all.