Through the first month of the season, which included five meets, emotions for Utah gymnastics fans have kind of been all over the place.
After the opening meet against Utah State, there was a little bit of trepidation, but no real worry.
After the fourth-place finish in the four-team meet against Oklahoma, LSU and Cal, there was frustration, disappointment and some feelings of déjà vu, but still a lot of hope.
After the win over Iowa State in the Red Rocks’ Big 12 opener, there was excitement mixed with devastation and worry.
After the record-breaking performance at the Best of Utah, there was a palpable sense of thrill, mixed with maybe a little bit of sheepishness.
And most recently, after an easy win at rival BYU, there was real frustration and confusion, maybe even some disenchantment.
That may not be a perfect description of the emotions of the first month of the 2025 season, but it is at least an approximation of how many have felt.
Why have things been such a roller coaster, with Utah ranked No. 4 in the country and on pace to be exactly where the Red Rocks have been almost every year — in contention for their conference title and for a national championship?
It mostly comes down to scoring.
Scores over wins and losses
For regular observers of women’s college gymnastics, this isn’t new, but scores matter a lot more in the sport than wins and losses do — until you get to the conference championships and then the national championship meet itself.
Scores, for the majority of the season, are how you determine how good a team is. Not win-loss record.
That is why Utah is currently 6-3 overall but ranked No. 4 in the country.
The thing is, Utah’s scores have been kind of all over the place this year.
In recent years, a good team score has fallen in the low-to-mid 197 range. A great team score, meanwhile, was in the high 197s. And an elite team score was a 198 or better.
Thus far, Utah has one great score (at the Best of Utah), one good score (against Iowa State) and three sub-197 scores.
It isn’t unheard of for Utah to score in the 196 range early in the year and then improve dramatically from there. It happened just last year.
But the last time Utah scored three 196s as a team in an entire season was 2018, and the last time the Red Rocks did it three times in the first month of the season was in 2016.
Weird for a team that entered the season believing its overall talent and depth were among the best in recent Utah history.
Making things all the more confusing — it can be argued that the gymnastics performed by Utah at the Best of Utah (197.950) and against BYU (196.975) was very similar, though the scores were not. Not even close.
After the four-team meet in Oklahoma, Utah coach Carly Dockendorf publicly commented on scores — a rarity for coaches — noting, “we felt that there were some routines where we felt honestly I have no idea how we got those scores.”
And that sense of confusion has continued to exist, if not always for Utah itself then for its fanbase.
The SCORE Board
Scores have always been a major point of discussion in gymnastics because of the subjective nature of judging.
For every judge who sees a routine one way, another sees it differently. And judging isn’t exactly the easiest task. Judges get one look at a routine from a very specific (limited) angle, before having to render their analysis.
Everyone else gets the benefit of replay — as many times as they want — and different camera angles.
Controversy over judging will never go away. That’s simply the sport.
“They are people judging,” Dockendorf said. “We aren’t having AI judge, you know? ... There is variability and that comes back to it is a subjective sport. And one person is seeing one thing and another is seeing something else.”
Scores have grown pretty inflated in recent years, though, with 198s being regular instead of special. There was considerable uproar last season when Ball State scored a 198 at the Tennessee Classic.
So during the offseason, a new program was devised. A new system to evaluate judges.
Called SCORE Board, it was supposed to work like this, per College Gym News:
- An eight-member committee evaluates uploaded videos of current NCAA routines, with each member specializing on one or two events.
- Judges are rated on their accuracy through a points system, with a judge earning more points the closer they are to the target score that was determined by the SCORE Board members.
- Judges will then be ranked with the best ones favored to receive postseason judging assignments.
- A hoped-for byproduct would be the education of judges, bringing more uniformity in how routines are evaluated across the country.
SCORE Board is in effect in this season, but this year it is more of an experiment than anything else. Its effect has been felt, however, especially in early-season meets, and perfect 10s have been hard to come by for pretty much everyone this year.
It isn’t difficult to draw a line between the implementation of SCORE Board and harsher judging of Utah.
The system has its problems, though, which could also explain the wide range of scores the Red Rocks have received so far. Particularly the outlier that was the Best of Utah.
Initially, judges had to opt in to receive feedback, making it likely that some judges took the call for more accurate scoring more seriously than others.
Per CGN’s Rhiannon Franck, judges actually won’t be receiving any kind of feedback this year at all, even if they opted in. In an email sent out to judges by the Women’s Collegiate Gymnastics Association on Wednesday, the WCGA made it known that its focus this year is on data collection to validate the system.
Also teams and conferences could — and some have — opt out of sharing routines to be evaluated by SCORE Board. Making any sort of uniformity in judging standards across the sport even more difficult to engender.
Dockendorf isn’t totally sold on the SCORE Board as it is currently devised, though she appreciates the effort behind it.
“There is always going to be an emotional part to (judging). There is always going to be a subjective part to (judging),” she said. “Can we improve? We always can improve. Is this the perfect equation? I’m not sold on this being the perfect equation. But I think everyone wants to see improvement and people are trying to make some changes so the scoring can be improved.”
Utah’s updated approach to scoring this season
Early in the season, by their own admission, the Red Rocks were bothered by low scores. They let the scores they received against Utah State and at the four-team Sprouts meet get to them and affect how they competed.
There has been a conscious shift, though, since then. Which is why Grace McCallum believed the Red Rocks competed their best yet this year at BYU, even though the scores didn’t come close to reflecting that.
Put simply, Utah has decided to accept that it needs to improve. That there are deductions in the Red Rocks' routines that need fixing.
“We’ve just decided to embrace the scoring,” Dockendorf said. “We can sit here and be like ‘I can’t believe this or that,’ but we’ve decided to flip the conversation and are really focusing on that we definitely have areas to improve.
“There are deductions that we are consistently getting that we need to fix. Because whether we are getting (deducted) now or later, we are going to get (those deductions).”
To that point, Dockendorf has utilized routine summaries — where judges explain the deductions taken in routines to coaches — more this season than ever before in her career.
And she readily admits that those summaries have been instructive and useful.
“I really didn’t use to do the routine summaries often before because I could pretty much watch (a routine) and be think, ‘Okay, I guess I have a tenth (to fix) here or whatever,’” Dockendorf said. “But we have been utilizing them a lot and some of the feedback has been important.
“There have been some consistencies (with deductions) that we are not focusing on as coaches in the gym that we need to focus on, because it is showing up on the routine summaries.”
Gymnastics will always be a subjective sport and judging and scores will always be a point of emphasis and conversation. That doesn’t mean that the judges are always wrong though. Or always right. Either way, Utah has decided to just go to work and let the scores fall where they fall.
“Sometimes there is variability and that comes back to it is a subjective sport,” Dockendorf said. “One person is seeing one thing and another is seeing something else. At the end of the day, we definitely have areas we need to improve.”
