ACC LAX 411

Your 2011 ACC Tournament Champs!

First, and foremost, congratulations to the Terps for beating Duke today and capturing the ACC Tournament in the Blue Devil's back yard. Maryland showed a lot of character today, clawing their way back into a game that looked to be getting away from them. That's all I wanted in my Easter basket. You can read all about that at one of the other more legitimate lax sites though. I've got a little something different to share.

As I was watching the game today, I couldn't help but be impressed by the level of play and grabbed my laptop to check out Maryland and Duke's rosters. I was curious to see where these kids were from and what high schools they attended. While browsing the rosters, I decided I wanted to see this tabular data displayed on a map. I know, I know, great minds think alike.

I'm sure you're all aware that this blog isn't my full-time job. I get up every morning and go to work for the man. A big part of my job involves helping clients to create maps from their customer databases. It helps them to stalk you when you ignore their calls and emails. Not glamorous by any stretch, but it pays the bills, most of them anyway. It's through this grind that I've picked up on things like geocoding addresses and giving said list of addresses a spatial component. I do find maps interesting and all this smoke I'm blowing is cover for being a nerd. There, I came clean, but it's not like I own 20 sided dice or anything like that.

I took about 15 minutes and grabbed the rosters of the 4 ACC schools off their respective sites, standardized the format, and ran it through a free on-line geocoding tool. The result is what you see below. It's interesting to see where each of these teams get their players and where the bulk of them hail from, at least I think so anyway. If you're inclined to browse the map, I'm sure you can figure out the navigation without any help, but I will point out the legend at the bottom of the map where you can filter the pins by each team. Click on the gray bar at the bottom to get all the pins to re-appear.

View ACC Men's Lacrosse 2011 in a full screen map

A few observations about the make up of the teams....

• 20 states and 2 Canadian provinces are represented on the teams
• Maryland leads the way with 51 players on the rosters, followed by New York with 36, and then Pennsylvania with 13 players
• The high school with the most players represented is Gilman School (Baltimore, MD) with 6, followed by Boys' Latin  (Baltimore, MD) 5, Georgetown Prep (Bethesda, MD) 5, Loyola Blakefield (Towson, MD) 5, and the following schools with 4 players each; Calvert Hall, Chaminade, Chapel Hill, Deerfield Academy, Malvern Prep, Manhasset, and Severna Park
• Of the 51 players from Maryland high schools, only 9 went to public school. 11 went to IAC schools and 30 attended MIAA schools. 1 went to boarding school out of state.

MAPS ARE FUN! Remember that people.