Hmmm. I'm not sure what the Americans use as a belt system. Over here in England the belts go white, red, yellow, orange, green, blue, brown, black with three tags in between each one.... So does it go white-yellow, or do you just not have the tags and skipped red?
As for your question.
In judo, you can achieve several different scores. We used to have a
koka score, but that got abolished because the IJF or BJA, I never remember which one decides these sort of things, wants to try and get more 'ippon judo' into the sport, rather than lots of small throws...
So currently, there are three scores you can get when you throw/hold somebody;
yuko, waza-ari, and
ippon.
YUKO is scored only by throwing. It's the lowest score. They aren't accumulative - no matter how many yuko you score, you won't win. A yuko is a score, but you don't win with a yuko unless it gets to the end of three minutes and you have a yuko and the opponent has nothing (or they have three yukos and you have four... or they have nine yukos and you have ten.... or they have a yuko and you have three hundred.... etc etc etc). You score yuko if, when you throw somebody, they land on their side. It's actually more complicated than that but for now, as far as you're concerned, it's about if they land on their side.
WAZA-ARI (spelling?) is a higher score. You don't win with waza-ari, unless it gets to 3 minutes and you've got more than the opponent. If it does go to three minutes and the opponent has a yuko and you have a waza-ari, no matter how many yukos they have, waza-ari always beats yukos. You score waza-ari either by throwing somebody and them landing on one shoulder, or by holding somebody down for 20 seconds. If you score TWO waza-aris, then you win instantly.
IPPON is the full score. Instant win. If you hold somebody down for 25 seconds, or throw somebody with power and control and they land flat on their back, then you win straight away and the fight stops, even if it's only been going about three seconds. That's probably what that girl scored - if she threw you, with any throw, with power and control, and you landed flat on your back, she wins instantly. Oh, and when you're a senior and you apply a strangle/armlock and the opponent yields, you score ippon.
It's actually more complicated. There are three elements to an ippon - power, control, and flat on their back. If I throw you with power and control and you land flat on your back, that's an ippon, I win instantly, the fight stops. If it's missing one of the elements, the score is scaled down. So if I throw you with control flat on your back, but without much power, I score waza-ari. If I throw you with power and control but you don't land flat on your back, it's waza-ari. If it's missing two of the elements - I throw you with control but no power and you're not flat on your back, or I throw you with power but no control and you're not flat on your back, or I throw you flat on your back without any power/control, then it's a yuko.
If one of the elements is REALLY missing, then it scales down to a yuko even though I have two of the elements. If I throw with power flat on your back and I don't have much control, it's waza-ari. If I do it with NO control, it's yuko. Similarly if I throw with power and control but you're on your side, then it's yuko.
A lot is up to referee's discretion, though. If you've been in control all fight and you threw a massive, technically perfect, ippon seoi nage and you just happened to twitch enough for it to be a strong waza-ari rather than an ippon, they might score ippon anyway because the throw was so good.
I once saw a fight where a boy, much bigger than the other kid, threw him with di ashi barai (spelling?) and scored waza-ari. This caused a lot of raised eyebrows because from quite a lot of angles it looked like an almost-perfect ippon. So they started fighting again and the kid who'd scored the waza-ari (who was now extremely annoyed) turned in for ippon seoi nage, POWERED the other guy over the top with huge amounts of force, absolutely BURIED him through the mat, and then looked at the ref with his eyebrow raised, like
Happy now?He got scored ippon.
A lot of refs would have scored ippon on the first throw, even if it was a waza-ari, purely because they wanted the fight to be over, because they were worried the smaller kid might get injured if he was thrown like that again.
It's quite complicated, but you get used to it... and I haven't even started talking about accumulation of shidos yet... You know what? I don't care if I've spelt shido wrong. The Japanese use kanji anyway. I daresay nobody actually cares overly much.
