Perfect 10s in NCAA gymnastics are skyrocketing. Is that a problem?
On a Friday night in February, Trinity Thomas, one of the nation’s best college gymnasts, did a one-and-a-half twisting backflip off the end of the four-inch beam and flung her arms out for balance, aiming for a stick. As she landed, however, her right foot shifted forward, a visible error that caused the announcers to groan in disappointment.
In the end, it didn’t matter. Thomas, a leading all-around gymnast for the University of Florida, scored a perfect 10.0 for the routine. On Instagram later, Thomas replied to a story congratulating her on the 10 with two words: “It wasn’t.”
By all accounts, women’s college gymnastics is having a moment. Amid an influx of Tokyo Olympians — including all-around champion Sunisa Lee — and a new flow of sponsorship cash, college arenas are selling out from Florida to Los Angeles. But the sport is plagued by controversy about scoring: In the past decade, the number of perfect 10s awarded has ballooned. In 2011, only two routines received perfect 10s. In 2022, 71 did.
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This year, 80 routines have received perfect scores, with the NCAA women’s championships set for Thursday to Saturday. LSU’s Haleigh Bryant received three perfect 10s in a single meet in March. Thomas, who has received 27 perfect 10s in her career, is tied for second in the NCAA record book — although an injury may prevent her from competing in the national championships.
“We’ve seen a dramatic increase in 10s — and not just 10s but the use of the top end of the scoring system,” said Spencer Barnes, writer for website the Balance Beam Situation.
The rise in 10s could galvanize fans who are showing new enthusiasm for college gymnastics. But some highly scored routines have contained visible errors, spurring controversy about how NCAA judges are compensated, trained and evaluated. As scores continue to creep up — and routines with clear errors receive perfect scores — some coaches and experts say judging needs a revamp.
“Too much of a good thing is not good,” Michigan Coach Bev Plocki said.
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And it’s not just the number of 10s. Teams’ national qualifying scores, used to rank them for regional championships in the postseason, also have increased over the past decade. In 2010, a team with a 194.4 could qualify into regional championships in 36th place. This year, the 36th-place team qualified with a 196.3. That two-point difference is equivalent to four falls.
“Over half the teams have an overall record or an apparatus record that they’ve set this season,” Barnes said.
Once, gymnasts at all levels — from competitive beginners and college athletes to elite gymnasts vying for spots on Olympic teams — were scored up to 10.0. But in 2006, elite gymnastics adopted an open-ended code; routines were composed of an open-ended difficulty score and an execution score. That meant no more perfect 10s at the Olympics or world championships. College gymnastics, however, retained both the old scoring system and the thrill that comes from reaching for perfection.
The perfect 10 is “a worldwide brand that we’ve inherited,” said Greg Marsden, who led the University of Utah to 10 national championships before his retirement in 2015. “We need to nurture that and protect it.”
The rising number of 10s — and scores in general — comes at a turning point for college gymnastics. Under pressure, in 2021 the NCAA allowed college athletes to begin profiting off their name, image and likeness (known as NIL). That transformed the pool of athletes considering college gymnastics. In previous years, Olympians who had already cashed in on their fame couldn’t compete in college. Since Tokyo, four of the six members of the U.S. Olympic team have competed for college teams, including Auburn, Oregon State, Utah and UCLA. That Olympic/college crossover has resulted in higher attention and TV ratings: Last year, the NCAA gymnastics championships reached a record 1.1 million viewers.
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This provides one explanation for the rise in scoring — that today’s gymnasts are simply performing more difficult skills, with better execution, than those in the past. “From the time that I was competing as an NCAA gymnast in the ’90s to now, the level of the gymnastics has gotten extremely high,” Rutgers Coach Umme Salim-Beasley said. “All of the gymnasts within every single NCAA team have high difficulty.”
But former judges, coaches and other experts say there are also problems in the current scoring system. In theory, college gymnasts are judged according to the same rules as Level 10 gymnasts — a comprehensive set of judging protocols known as the Code of Points tells them how much each flip, turn or pirouette is worth and what kinds of deductions for errors to subtract from the overall score. A small step on the landing, for example, is up to 0.1 points off. Unpointed toes, 0.05 points off.
In practice, however, judges don’t take points off for every error. At her first college meet, Gwyneth Rhiannon Franck was told by a fellow judge to evaluate college gymnasts just like Level 10 gymnasts. Franck, who worked as an NCAA judge between 2012 and 2022, added up the errors and gave a gymnast performing on the floor a 9.3; her fellow judge gave a 9.8. “She said, ‘Maybe I do judge easier in college,’ and then she told me what my score should be,” Franck said. “I was so embarrassed.”
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Skipping out on certain deductions, Franck added, is known as judging “college nice.” She now evaluates routines that receive perfect 10s for website College Gym News — and often finds obvious deductions.
“You’re supposed to judge by the Level 10 code, but there are some deductions that are just never taken,” said Jessica O’Beirne, co-host of gymnastics podcast GymCastic.
Meanwhile, there are no rewards for judges who try to score according to the rules as written. In the current system, the only evaluation of judges is done by the coaches themselves. After each meet, coaches fill out a form evaluating whether the judges were prepared, professional and fair. Those evaluations affect which judges are given the most prominent and desirable assignments.
Plocki, the Michigan coach, says that system creates perverse incentives. “Say I’m angry because I left the competition and that judge gave my kid too low of a score,” she said. “So I’m going to negatively evaluate that judge.” That, she said, creates a situation where judges are incentivized to give higher scores to get better ratings and thus better assignments. “The whole thing is backwards,” Plocki added.
There is also a perception that teams higher in the NCAA rankings — or with historical success — are judged more generously than other teams. “Maybe these teams have more elites or more national team members or more Olympians,” Salim-Beasley said. “The expectation is that they’re going to score higher and maybe get more benefit of the doubt.”
Some coaches have urged the National Association of Women’s Gymnastics Judges to establish an independent evaluation system. But so far, the association has been reluctant. “We have gone back to the judges’ association and asked if they would get involved in with oversight and accountability, and they just were not comfortable with that,” Marsden said. The association did not respond to requests for comment.
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Others have suggested that college gymnastics needs its own judging code — one that preserves the possibility of a perfect 10 but also codifies which deductions count and which don’t.
Kathy Johnson-Clarke, a 1984 Olympian and a gymnastics commentator for ESPN, is one of them. “It is time for NCAA to have its own code of points that is condensed and streamlined,” she said. “Don’t pretend [the code] is important if you’re not going to use it.” Johnson-Clarke wrote a proposal for a new code of points for Inside Gymnastics magazine in December.
There is precedent for big judging changes. In 2003 and 2004, the numbers of 10s were even higher than they are today — in 2004, a whopping 98 routines received a perfect 10. At the time, judges were hired and assigned by the universities themselves, a system that resulted in sky-high scores for the home team. Coaches and the judges’ association got together and agreed on a system in which regional “assigners” picked which judges would score which meets. By 2005, the number of perfect 10s had dropped from 98 to 18.
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Few believe that judges are intentionally making errors or bringing unfair bias. Judges are also paid, at most, only a few hundred dollars per meet; they juggle judging as a part-time job alongside full-time careers. Any attempt to change judging could reduce the number of people willing to participate.
“I believe that 99 percent of judges have their heart in the right place and are trying to do the right thing,” Plocki said.
But most experts worry that, without changes, the value of 10s — and of high scores in general — will start to diminish. “What we don’t want to happen is that the scoring gets so ridiculous that even to the general viewer it starts to seem like a farce,” said Marsden, the former Utah coach. “If it goes too far, it may diminish interest in our sport. And we can’t afford to do that when we are just beginning to really take off.”
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