Just curuious, if you have a team or teams that have the talent at a specific level, but are lacking in a clean execution time and time again, at what point do you say it's time to drop down a level? Do you keep working it until the very end, knowing you have the ability? It's always a tricky thing because those with the higher skills won't be able to use them once you drop down, so perhaps it's not as challenging. Then again, performing a clean routine even at a lower level is not necessarily a piece of cake. I guess it depends on what the priorities of the gym are, and how frustrated your teams are if they're placing low, knowing they can do better. If the skills aren't there, the choice is obvious. But when they are, it's tough. Do you wait until Nationals? Or maybe your last competition?
We're actually in the opposite situation, we're performing now at a lower level hoping to move up. But I wondered how other gyms decided when to move down?
AbbyByTheBay wrote: Just curuious, if you have a team or teams that have the talent at a specific level, but are lacking in a clean execution time and time again, at what point do you say it's time to drop down a level? Do you keep working it until the very end, knowing you have the ability? It's always a tricky thing because those with the higher skills won't be able to use them once you drop down, so perhaps it's not as challenging. Then again, performing a clean routine even at a lower level is not necessarily a piece of cake. I guess it depends on what the priorities of the gym are, and how frustrated your teams are if they're placing low, knowing they can do better. If the skills aren't there, the choice is obvious. But when they are, it's tough. Do you wait until Nationals? Or maybe your last competition? We're actually in the opposite situation, we're performing now at a lower level hoping to move up. But I wondered how other gyms decided when to move down?
Shouldn't a team compete at the level that the majority of the team has? In my opinion, if you have the skill level, then that's the level that you should compete in. Just because your skill level is maybe only at a level 2 doesn't mean that your execution should be less than a level 3. To me, execution has to do with coaching style and what is expected during practices. Do the coaches demand good "cheer" technique as well as tumbling and stunting difficulty? You can't make a team do skills that are too hard, if you can't tuck or twist, you can't tuck or twist. But what you can do, how well you perform it and execute it would be determined a lot by what is going on at each practice. There are some awesome level 2/3 teams that are sharp, and clean....but that doesn't mean that they should compete level 3/4, right? So, I think the reverse would be true also. Just my humble thoughts.
Not only that but what do you do when you have NO competition. I mean 3 out of the last 5 competitions 1 of our teams had no competition at all and the other team had 2 teams in the division only once. What do you do in that respect? Do you approach your coach and ask. I would hate if I paid a whole season and my daughter only had 2 competitions with actual other teams competing in her division.
CheerMama wrote: Not only that but what do you do when you have NO competition. I mean 3 out of the last 5 competitions 1 of our teams had no competition at all and the other team had 2 teams in the division only once. What do you do in that respect? Do you approach your coach and ask. I would hate if I paid a whole season and my daughter only had 2 competitions with actual other teams competing in her division.
GREAT QUESTION!!! Maybe one of the owner/coaches out there would like to put their opinion in on this one. I know that when you register weeks and weeks in advance you don't know what the competition will be like, but don't you kinda have an idea from networking with each other who should be going where, and what comps are generally well attended?
It is almost impossible for gyms or coaches to know if a competition will have other teams in their divisions. Especially if you have many teams.
I think the real solution to no competition is reducing the number of divisions. I say USASF should rethink the 6 levels and go to 4: Beginning, Intermediate, Advanced, and Open (Lv6).
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There's really no way to know until the last minute. It changes from year to year as to which competitions are well attended and which ones aren't, and new companies are headed out our way more and more every year. A lot of times coaches from other teams will say they're going to event X, but then they actually end up going to event Y, for whatever reason. And since competition registrations are required well in advance and schedules don't come out until the week of the competition, there's really no way to know who is truly going to be there until the schedules come out...and sometimes even that changes from early in the week until the day of competition!
Plus, if we all went to the same competitions all the time together, then all those other competitions would stop coming out to Northern California and then we have no options. It would be like 6 or 7 years ago when all we had was USA and UCA! So I like all the choices. Sure it makes the competition fields smaller for some of them but it's nice to not have a 14-hour day at a competition every once in awhile!
Dont' most competitions allow you to change levels right before? The schedule is generally posted 4 days before.
We moved our Youth 4 to Jr 4 just so they had competition. It was worth it!!!
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Yes but how would you move for example a Youth a Youth 3 team to a Youth 4 or 2 you would have to change stunts tumbling ect and I don't thing 4 days is enough time
I think the real solution to no competition is reducing the number of divisions. I say USASF should rethink the 6 levels and go to 4: Beginning, Intermediate, Advanced, and Open (Lv6).
I don't think the levels should be reduced, I think the divisions should. IMHO, there should be "the little ones", Youth, Junior, Senior (1-4 boys), Senior Coed. I really like there being small and large as well, but that might start the whole ball rolling on adding more divisions. I like the progression of skill the current levels use.
As for when to drop down a level, I don't think a team should drop down if they have the skills to be in that level.
I really agree with you. I don't think you see any difference in coed divisions until you get to the senior level. You might occassionally get the boy at a junior age that's particularly strong, but you're just as likely to come across that strong of a girl.
I liked how they used to do it, where if you had up to a certain number of boys (2? 3? I forget, it was so long ago) you were still considered just regular "senior" or "junior" or whatever.
At least, though, they got rid of the prep divisions. That helped a lot!
And I think if we see the age changes like we're hearing, we won't see as many programs consolidating all of their boys onto their senior coed teams. So maybe we'll be seeing more teams in the junior coed divisions.
Last year, we moved our junior coed 4 into senior coed 4 several times (including nationals) to give them more competition because junior coed 4 was always such a small division.
-- Edited by Diva Coach Melissa at 17:37, 2007-01-12
