by Brina Sept. 1, 2019
Today, I’m celebrating Score for Score’s first birthday! One year ago today, I pushed my local repo to Heroku and this website was born.
I’ve learned a lot about blogging in the past year - mostly, that it’s hard. I have a lot of ideas, but it turns out that turning an idea into a blog post takes a lot more time and effort than turning an idea into a tweet. I haven’t posted as often as I’d hoped, but I’m pretty happy with the posts I have put out.
So I wanted to take this opportunity to pull out my top ten most popular posts from the past year. New readers, I hope you’ll take a dive into the archives! My favorite posts aren’t always my most popular posts, but I hope you’ll enjoy!
Team Japan has looked great in the lead-up to Tokyo. Is this just a coincidence, or does hosting the Olympics tend to give teams a boost?
The second I saw that MyKayla Skinner had announced her return to elite, I dropped what I was doing to write up her prospects. I’m a grad student. I can do that. Since then, I’ve been impressed by the speed of her comeback. I never said her path to Tokyo would be easy, but I still believe it exists.
In this post, I took a deep dive into data from the Rio Olympics that separates out artistry deductions from other execution deductions. Armed with this data, we can finally get a sense for how judges use the artistry portion of the Code of Points.
And if you liked this post, you’ll like Part II even more — even though that post didn’t crack the top ten!
In this post, I asked gym nerds which gymnasts they think are inconsistent, and compared their answers to my quantitative measure of a gymnast’s consistency (see #4 below!). The gymternet is spot on about most gymnasts… with one very notable exception!
Here, I highlight a chart from the FIG on the ages of gymnasts at the 2017 World Championships. I love featuring charts of the day and I’m always on the lookout for more cool gymnastics graphs, so if you find one, pass it along!
This is the most popular post from my From the Academy series, where I review academic papers on scoring in gymnastics. In this one, the author tests whether former gymnasts judge split leaps more accurately than mere mortals.
In this post, I explored how to measure consistency in gymnastics, using everyone’s favorite heartbreaker Angelina Melnikova as a case study. Creating a quantitative method of consistency is nowhere near as straightforward as it sounds!
The metric I presented here ultimately became the consistency stat that you see atop every gymnast’s page. (Or at least, every gymnast with enough data!)
Some leos are awesome and some are not. And we all love to talk about that. But do gymnasts with better leos get higher scores? I used the scores from TheGymternet’s leo panel from the 2018 US Championships to find out!
I think the title here is self explanatory. MG Elite Wrists. You know what I mean.
This is by far the most popular post on my website. I wrote it just after Flo gymnastics announced that the Michigan NCAA regionals would be locked behind a steep paywall, out of reach for many fans. I was seeing a lot of outrage on Twitter, but I was having a hard time picking out concrete complaints that a large corporation would respond to. In this post, I tried to distill the gymternet’s sentiments in an open letter - and I think a lot of people agreed with what I had to say.
So there’s the top ten! I’d also like to highlight my posts on robot judges — it’s some of the work I’m most proud of but it just doesn’t get the same attention as sexier topics.
What’s coming up in Year 2 of Score for Score? You’ll just have to follow along to find out!
Tags: Score for Score Business