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27 T he 2017 men's gymnastics season may feel different thanks to a rule change in the scor- ing system. e change eliminates an element category in five of the six events, meaning that each gymnast will do one less skill in his routine. "ere used to be five element groups, five specific types of skills that you had to do," University of Iowa head coach JD Reive said. "ere are now four element groups. You will still see a variety of skills performed, but they combined a couple of the groups." e result is that each gymnast's score will be .500 lower than before and as a team, their scores will be roughly 15 points lower. is change is the most recent one that the gymnasts have to get used to. "e rules change every four years aer the Olym- pics," senior Mark Springett said. "Because of these new rules, the United States Gymnastics Associa- tion (USGA) and the International Federation of Gymnastics (FIG) put out, the scoring system will be different this year. is is not new, we've seen the scoring system change before." e last major scoring change was in 2006 when the USGA and FIG changed to their current sys- tem from a 10.0 format. "e new code and scoring change will have a major impact on college gymnastics from here," senior captain Andrew Botto said. "ey devalued a lot of skills on all six events and changed the way combination passes on floor are counted. ey also made a lot of specific rules regarding what skills you can do together for parallel bars and high bar." Good news for the fans is that the gymnastics they see will not look different. "e fans will not notice it. ey are still looking for great gymnastics and fun, high flying stuff," Reive said. "You will only notice it once you start looking into the nuances and the math behind it." For fans, the easiest way to make sense of the change is to take a score you see this year and add .500 to get a score from last year. e hard part will be for the gymnasts who had to sit down over the summer, read the new rules, and change routines accordingly. "We had to take a couple of days to read and understand the new code and skills to maximize our potential at competitions," Botto said. "ere are a lot of skills that our team had to change and adjust, but being able to do that over summer was beneficial because we had a lot of time to play with new skills and see what works best in our rou- tines." e Hawkeyes debut their 2017 season at the an- nual Windy City Invitational, hosted by Illinois- Chicago, on Jan, 14 at 7:30 p.m. (CT). "Everybody is in this same position where they have to change their routine construction, so I expect the first two meets to be somewhat of an adjustment period this year," Reive said. JAMUARY SCHEDULE Jan. 14 at Windy City Invitational Jan. 22 Illinois Chicago