Hometown Map Of The 2017 NCAA All-Americans
Hometown Map Of The 2017 NCAA All-Americans
We took the hometown and placement of every All-American at the 2017 NCAA Wrestling Championships and plotted it on a map. Check out the eye-opening results!
The 2017 NCAA Wrestling Championships provided more than 10 wonderful brackets in St. Louis last month. It also produced a treasure trove of data to be sliced, diced, and examined.
The breakdown of the raw numbers is available; now it's time to dig deeper, starting with maps of the hometowns of the All-Americans.
Rather than plot one pin for each All-American, we assigned NCAA placement points to each place-winner and extended a three-dimensional spike, whose size corresponds to the number of points scored (16, 12, 10, nine, seven, six, four, and three for placements first through eighth place).
When two or more wrestlers from the same city achieved All-American status (e.g. the three Stillwater, Oklahoma, local products: Kaid Brock, Chandler Rogers, and Joseph Smith), their point totals were added together, and the spike was extended accordingly.
A wide-angle shot of this map shows how the sport of wrestling draws on a talent pool stretching from coast to coast.
Zooming in, we get a better look at the various regions within the wrestling community.
First up, the Northeast megalopolis:
This is an amalgamation of many distinct metro areas but all 16 All-Americans represented in the picture are within a couple hours drive from Philadelphia.
Maryland is once again carried by the great Kyle Snyder of Ohio State, joined by eighth-place finisher Nathan Kraisser of Campbell.
Northeast Pennsylvania had a particularly strong year, thanks to Benton native and Hodge Trophy winner Zain Retherford as well as the all-Lehigh Valley final at 125 pounds between Darian Cruz and Ethan Lizak.
You can watch Cruz and Lizak go at it in the finals in the video below.
Traveling down I-95, we notice the insurgent South and its better-than-usual performance at this year's tournament.
The spike in the upper right is for Virginia Tech's Joey Dance, by way of Christiansburg, VA. Other southern metro areas represented are Winston-Salem, NC; Columbia, SC; Atlanta; and Chattanooga, TN.
Back up in the more traditional midwestern hotbed, we see an explosion of All-Americans.
Over one-quarter of all the 2017 NCAA All-Americans are represented in the map above.
It's worth zooming in even closer to the Pittsburgh and Cleveland metro areas, two medium sized cities that punch far above their weight every year at the NCAA tournament.
The spikes represent nine total All-Americans, including seven top three placers and three national champs. Might we suggest an all-star meet between the two regions in Youngstown, Ohio?
Below you can watch the all-Northeast Ohio final at 141 pounds between Virginia's George DiCamillo and Oklahoma State's Dean Heil.
Sweeping further west, we can see the highly productive Great Plains states as well as the Southwest.
It was a banner year for Oklahoma, which finished with five All-Americans. Texas may be catching some of that wrestling fever, as the Dallas metro area had a champion in Bo Nickal of Penn State and a sixth-place finisher in Jack Mueller of Virginia.
Minnesota and Iowa also had typically strong years at the 2017 NCAAs.
Our final stop completes our wrestling manifest destiny with the West Coast.
The talent-rich Central Valley once again had multiple All-Americans -- Isaiah Martinez of Illinois and Nick Nevills of Penn State. One can only assume that this number will rise when the newly reconstituted Fresno State wrestling program gets back to Division I competition next season.
No All-Americans hailed from Alaska, Hawaii, overseas territories, or foreign countries this year, so our map is contained to the contiguous United States.
The breakdown of the raw numbers is available; now it's time to dig deeper, starting with maps of the hometowns of the All-Americans.
Rather than plot one pin for each All-American, we assigned NCAA placement points to each place-winner and extended a three-dimensional spike, whose size corresponds to the number of points scored (16, 12, 10, nine, seven, six, four, and three for placements first through eighth place).
When two or more wrestlers from the same city achieved All-American status (e.g. the three Stillwater, Oklahoma, local products: Kaid Brock, Chandler Rogers, and Joseph Smith), their point totals were added together, and the spike was extended accordingly.
A wide-angle shot of this map shows how the sport of wrestling draws on a talent pool stretching from coast to coast.
Zooming in, we get a better look at the various regions within the wrestling community.
First up, the Northeast megalopolis:
This is an amalgamation of many distinct metro areas but all 16 All-Americans represented in the picture are within a couple hours drive from Philadelphia.
Maryland is once again carried by the great Kyle Snyder of Ohio State, joined by eighth-place finisher Nathan Kraisser of Campbell.
Northeast Pennsylvania had a particularly strong year, thanks to Benton native and Hodge Trophy winner Zain Retherford as well as the all-Lehigh Valley final at 125 pounds between Darian Cruz and Ethan Lizak.
You can watch Cruz and Lizak go at it in the finals in the video below.
Traveling down I-95, we notice the insurgent South and its better-than-usual performance at this year's tournament.
The spike in the upper right is for Virginia Tech's Joey Dance, by way of Christiansburg, VA. Other southern metro areas represented are Winston-Salem, NC; Columbia, SC; Atlanta; and Chattanooga, TN.
Back up in the more traditional midwestern hotbed, we see an explosion of All-Americans.
Over one-quarter of all the 2017 NCAA All-Americans are represented in the map above.
It's worth zooming in even closer to the Pittsburgh and Cleveland metro areas, two medium sized cities that punch far above their weight every year at the NCAA tournament.
The spikes represent nine total All-Americans, including seven top three placers and three national champs. Might we suggest an all-star meet between the two regions in Youngstown, Ohio?
Below you can watch the all-Northeast Ohio final at 141 pounds between Virginia's George DiCamillo and Oklahoma State's Dean Heil.
Sweeping further west, we can see the highly productive Great Plains states as well as the Southwest.
It was a banner year for Oklahoma, which finished with five All-Americans. Texas may be catching some of that wrestling fever, as the Dallas metro area had a champion in Bo Nickal of Penn State and a sixth-place finisher in Jack Mueller of Virginia.
Minnesota and Iowa also had typically strong years at the 2017 NCAAs.
Our final stop completes our wrestling manifest destiny with the West Coast.
The talent-rich Central Valley once again had multiple All-Americans -- Isaiah Martinez of Illinois and Nick Nevills of Penn State. One can only assume that this number will rise when the newly reconstituted Fresno State wrestling program gets back to Division I competition next season.
No All-Americans hailed from Alaska, Hawaii, overseas territories, or foreign countries this year, so our map is contained to the contiguous United States.