How do you run your first rhythmic gymnastics meet?

Book the venue first and the judges second. Everything else hangs off those two confirmations. Twelve weeks is enough for a 40-gymnast club meet if entries close in week six and the start list reaches coaches in week three.

Weeks out	What gets done	Why then
12	Hall booked, 13 x 13 m floor area confirmed	Halls and hire carpets go first
11	Categories, apparatus, routine lengths, entry fee fixed	Coaches choreograph to your rules
10	Entries open, judges asked	Judges cannot be found late
9	First aid, insurance, photography policy signed off	Halls ask before confirming
8	Medals and certificates ordered	Engraving runs four to six weeks
7	Judges confirmed in writing, with times and fees	A verbal yes is not a booking
6	Entries close	A moving list gets timetabled twice
5	Rotation and draft timetable calculated
4	Music deadline, every file played once	Bad audio is the classic failure
3	Start list and timetable out to clubs	Two weeks is the federation norm
2	Judges' pack out, volunteers rostered, forms printed
1	Walkthrough, sound test, dry run of the scoring
0	Judges' briefing 45 minutes before the first warm-up

The rows people skip are week 4 and week 1. Playing every file yourself catches the track exported at 4 kHz; a dry run with invented scores catches the laptop that cannot see the venue wi-fi.

Match the number of routines to what your gymnasts have rehearsed. Under the 2025-2028 Code the senior individual programme is hoop, ball, clubs and ribbon, four routines of 1:15 to 1:30 each. Juniors compete the same four, and the Code lets them use rope in national and local international competitions.

A first meet needs none of that. One freehand routine of 30 to 60 seconds is already a complete competition: walk on, hold a starting pose, perform to music, take a score. USA Gymnastics builds its grassroots Xcel programme this way, with recommended maximum times of 30 seconds at entry level and 1:00 at Bronze.

Category	Routines	Apparatus	Routine length
First-timers	1	Freehand, no apparatus	30-60 s
Development	2	Freehand plus hoop, or hoop plus ball	up to 1:20
Junior individual	4	Hoop, ball, clubs, ribbon	1:15-1:30
Senior individual	4	Hoop, ball, clubs, ribbon	1:15-1:30
Group of five	2	One set of five, one mixed 3+2 set	2:15-2:30

Size apparatus to the gymnast rather than the rulebook: British Gymnastics accepts a 4 m ribbon for its Pre-Espoir and Espoir gymnasts and 5 m for pre-juniors and juniors, against the 6 m the FIG Apparatus Norms set for seniors. One duty comes straight from the Code. Two complete sets of replacement apparatus sit along two sides of the floor, leaving the judges' side and the entry clear, so a gymnast who loses a ribbon over the line picks up yours. Marking detail sits in our rhythmic gymnastics scoring guide.

Two judges will get a small meet finished and four will get it finished well. Do not copy the championship panel: the Code seats 4 difficulty judges (two on body, two on apparatus), 4 artistry judges and 4 execution judges, and a club trying to fill twelve seats will not run at all.

The Code covers the smaller case. With four judges on artistry or execution, the highest and lowest deductions are dropped and the middle two averaged. With two or three, every deduction counts. Below four per panel one harsh judge moves the result, so pick people who have marked together before.

Meet size	Routines	Judging panel	Line and time	Desk and floor	People
In-house, 15-20 gymnasts	20-30	2, each marking D, A and E	1, doubling as time judge	3	6
Club open, 40 gymnasts	80-90	4: one D, one A, two E	1 line + 1 time	5	11
Regional, 100+ gymnasts	200+	8: two D, two A, four E	2 line + 1 time	8	19
Championship format	60-120	12: four D, four A, four E	2 line + 2 time	full crew	30+

Recruit through the entry form. British Gymnastics makes each club supply judges in proportion to its entry: one county-level judge for one to three gymnasts, two for four or more, and one of that pair has to be regional level. Copy that and the panel fills itself. Brief everyone 45 minutes before the first warm-up, carpet already down, and settle who records the 0.30 line penalty and who checks attire and jewellery, worth 0.30 each.

Rotate a whole category through one apparatus at a time. Ten gymnasts on four apparatus is four rotations of ten routines, not ten blocks of four. Judges hold a mental reference for the apparatus in front of them, and re-setting it every 90 seconds is where scores drift.

Draw the order inside each category at random, then adjust two things by hand. Split club-mates so one coach is not needed in two places at once, and put the youngest category first while the hall is quiet. Publish the start list two weeks out and treat it as fixed apart from withdrawals.

Warm-up is not floor time. The Code is blunt about it: warming up in the competition hall is forbidden and costs the gymnast 0.50, and the Technical Regulations put the last warm-up floor in a separate hall, screened off from the training floors. Championships add podium training in the competition hall on the days before. A one-day club meet has no such day, so give each category a 15 to 20 minute familiarisation block on the carpet in start-list order, immediately before its first rotation.

Three penalties on your day sheet come from organisation rather than gymnastics. Presenting early or late costs 0.50. Presenting the wrong apparatus for that position in the order costs 0.50, and the gymnast performs the missed apparatus at the end of the rotation. Delaying the competition by more than 30 seconds while preparing costs another 0.50. One marshal at the entry gate prevents most of them.

One audio file per routine, named the same way by every club, delivered four weeks out, with a USB copy in the coach's bag. Then one person on the sound desk who does nothing else all day. British Gymnastics closes its own music window a week before the event, which leaves no room to chase a broken file, so take the extra three weeks.

The file name is the whole system. FIG requires federation, gymnast name and apparatus on each file; British Gymnastics uses gymnast, club, category and routine, in MP3 on the backup drive. Pick one pattern, put it in the entry pack, and rename anything that arrives differently.

Timing is a separate job. The stopwatch starts as the gymnast begins to move and stops when she is completely still, so the clock is not the length of the track. A musical introduction of up to 4 seconds without body or apparatus movement is tolerated. Time counts in whole seconds: 1:30.99 is clean, 1:31.00 costs 0.05, and each further second costs 0.05 again.

Situation	What the gymnast does	Cost
Wrong track, or start not heard	Resumes the pose, performs again to the correct track	None
Music disappears mid-routine	Leaves the floor, performs again once the jury approves	None if approved
Music distorts mid-routine	Finishes and is judged, or stops and asks to repeat	None if approved
Routine runs 3 seconds over 1:30	Nothing, the time judge records it	0.15

Leave two spare slots per rotation so a re-run does not push the day. Check the licence that applies where you compete: PPL and PRS in the UK, GEMA in Germany, ZAiKS in Poland.

Decide before the day how a number written by a judge becomes a line on the results sheet. The routine total is D + A + E minus penalties, and the all-around is the sum of a gymnast's routine totals inside her own category. The rest is logistics, and logistics is where club meets fall over.

Do that arithmetic on paper first. A 40-gymnast meet with 86 routines and three panel scores each produces 258 slips. At 45 seconds to carry a slip to the desk, read it and type it, that is 3 hours 14 minutes of one person's day, longer than the competition spends on the carpet. Two runners and two typists make it work; one laptop does not.

Spreadsheet days fail in the same three ways. A sort that moves the scores but not the names. A blank cell averaged as zero because a judge missed a routine. One file on one machine, so nothing is published until the meet ends. On paper, publish after every rotation and keep penalties on one sheet held by one person.

With JudgeMate each judge enters D, A and E on their own phone, one judge can cover all three panels at a small meet, and the public results page recalculates within seconds. From four scores upward the highest and lowest are dropped first, the way the Code does it. Difficulty stays the judge's own calculation.

Write the tie-break into the entry pack before anyone needs it, and copy the FIG ladder rather than inventing one. The Technical Regulations settle an all-around tie on the higher total E score, then the higher total A score, then the higher total D score; if it survives all three the tie is not broken and the places are shared. JudgeMate applies the same three steps. Schedule awards as a timed block per category, twelve minutes each.