The NCAA News - News and Features

The NCAA News -- February 1, 1999

Balancing act

Realignment addresses competitive-equity concerns in men's gymnastics

BY VANESSA L. ABELL
STAFF WRITER

Balance is a key requirement of a top gymnast. It's also essential for those who administer national championships.

Currently, those administrators are balancing competition in the National Collegiate Men's Gymnastics Championships field due to changes in geographic representation.

The East regional will now feature seven teams -- five selected through regional qualifying averages and two conference champions, which will receive automatic berths, from the Big Ten Conference and the Eastern College Athletic Conference (ECAC).

The West regional will have five teams competing for three spots -- the top four teams in the West based on their regional qualifying averages along with the champion of the Mountain Pacific Sports Federation (MPSF), which receives an automatic berth.

Only one independent, the University of Illinois at Chicago, spon-sors men's gymnastics. The other 25 schools are members of one of the three men's gymnastics conferences: the Big Ten, the ECAC and the MPSF. With each conference receiving an automatic bid to regional competition, the hope of the men's gymnastics community is that the promotion of conference play will increase the parity of competition in both the East and West regions.

Spreading the talent

Teams that make up the Big Ten and the MPSF have long dominated the championships field. Although the conference alignments have changed recently, the same teams have appeared again and again at the national championships.

In an effort to improve the parity of the teams competing in men's gymnastics, the NCAA Men's Gymnastics Committee made slight modifications to the numbers of teams competing at the two regional sites. Previously, the East and West regionals included six teams, from which the top three advanced to the championships.

The committee decided to reevaluate the regional representation based on the total number of teams competing in the East and West regions. The committee found that of the 26 sponsoring institutions, 18 were schools located in the East. Because of those numbers, the committee decided to competitively balance the regionals by placing seven teams in the East and five in the West.

Tom Dunn, coach at the University of Iowa and chair of the Men's Gymnastics Committee, is pleased with the positive response of the membership to the changes.

"The committee thought there might be some backlash, but it was fairly well accepted," he said.

Dunn believes that as a whole, men's gymnastics coaches want the best teams at the national championships regardless of the region in which they compete during the regular season.

When first drafting the new procedures, the committee looked at moving teams based on their strengths to either region regardless of geographic location. Many individuals in the men's gymnastics community feel that the best situation would be to have all teams seeded according to regional qualifying averages and paired appropriately so that the top three teams in the country would match up with those teams rated at numbers 10 through 12 at one of the regional contests. The remaining six teams, seeds four through nine, would meet at the other regional.

A recommendation to change the number of qualifiers in each region to more accurately correlate to the number of respective teams within each region prompted the committee to explore the balancing act. The committee determined that the East region, with the greater number of teams participating, deserved a larger number of teams competing at its regional than the West.

Advancement to the championships will remain the same, with the top three scoring teams from both regional competitions heading to the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, on April 22-24. The same procedure is in place for individual and all-around competitors with the top three scorers of each event at each regional advancing.

One ECAC coach, Roy Johnson of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, also a member of the Men's Gymnastics Committee, sees the changes in regional competition as a benefit to the sport.

"Historically, there haven't been a lot of teams (at the championships) from the ECAC," Johnson said. "(The changes) will make the ECAC a stronger conference."

Cliff Gauthier, coach of fellow ECAC member College of William and Mary, agrees.

"It's good for Eastern gymnastics in general," he said. "It helps our team in that we can go to the conference championships and that it really means something. It gives it a lot more significance than it had in the past in that the conference champion will now qualify to the NCAA regionals."

Not all agree

Most feel that the new structure will create excitement at the conference championships. With automatic qualifications on the line, it will give the conference meets much more significance.

But not all coaches agree with the decisions made by the committee. Some feel that it would have been more appropriate to keep both regional competitions to six teams and weight the regions with an identical number of participating institutions.

Lou Burkel, coach at the U.S. Air Force Academy, believes that approach would have been best.

"They should have moved a couple of teams to the West region," he said. Burkel said that would have balanced the regional competitions to meet the needs of the regions and would have kept both region's opportunities equal in that an identical number of teams would compete for an identical number of regional slots for an identical number of championship berths.

Regional alignment isn't the only change for 1999. The way teams qualify for regionals also will be different. For regional qualifying averages, the score earned at the conference championships can be used as one of the scores. Previously, the regional qualifying average was determined by averaging the highest home meet score with the two highest away meet scores with the conference meet score being an option as one of the three scores.

This year, the regional qualifying average will be computed by selecting the highest home meet score along with the two highest away meet scores. Of those three scores, the highest score is replaced with the team's conference meet score. Those three remaining scores are then averaged to establish the team's regional qualifying average. The same procedure will be used for team, individual and all-around regional qualifying averages.