One of the most difficult tasks for judges is to quantify how much a bobble, fall or omission in a stunt or tumbling pass should count against a teams score.

At CHEERSPORT events, the Point Deduction Judge (PDJ) is responsible for this. The PDJ will still be responsible for judging and scoring the overall routine. However, instead of writing constructive comments and suggestions like the other panel judges, the PDJ will focus on tracking tumbling and stunting bobbles, falls and omissions.

The PDJ fills out a special score sheet which includes a section that they will use to keep track of the # and severity of stunting and tumbling bobbles, falls and omissions. Based on CHEERSPORT guidelines, they assign the correct points each bobble, fall or omission is worth and tally these points in a separate box. These 'deduction points' will be subtracted from the teams overall routine score.

Additionally, the 'deduction points' will determine the score a team can earn in the 'Perfection of Routine' category. Specifically, for each 'deduction point' a team is assessed, 'Perfection of Routine' score that team can earn is reduced by a point.

The ‘deduction point total’ will be multiplied by 3 and deducted from the final overall score of the team.

Each Individual Bobble (Tumbling) will result in a 0.5 point deduction and each Individual Fall (Tumbling) will result in a 1 point deduction.

Each Group Bobble (Stunt Group in Basket Tosses, Pyramids and/or Partner Stunts) will result in a 1 point deduction and each Group Fall (Stunt Group in Basket Tosses, Pyramids and/or Partner Stunts) will result in a 1.5 point deduction.

Omissions in standing tumbling, running tumbling, basket tosses, pyramids and partner stunts will also be deducted by the PDJ. Omission mistakes are obvious errors in technical skills that are noticeable to the PDJ. Example – last tumbler in a level 5 routine only performs a round off after other squad members have already performed fulls and double fulls or all partner stunt groups perform a body position and the front center flyer stays with feet together. Each Omission will result in a .5 point deduction.

For example, a perfect 'Perfection of Routine' score is 20 points, if a team is assessed 4.5 'deduction points', the score that the team will receive in the 'Perfection of Routine' category from all the judges would be 15.5 points. This lowers the possible maximum score from 150 per judge to 145.5 per judge. The 4.5 ‘deduction points’ are also multiplied by three - 4.5 x 3 = 13.5 and then subtracted from the maximum score. Keeping 3 scores from the judging panel, your total is 410 then you subtract 13.5 (4.5 in deductions x 3 judges) = 396.5.