Finally figured out a way to create some sort of semblance of a hear map using D1CW’s awesome recruiting data. The larger the cluster of top 150 recruits and the higher their rank translates to the deeper shades of red. You have to imagine the rest of the US filling in the empty spaces.
I also made this more granular map that doesn’t show the “heat” quite as well but you can pin point the wrestling hotbeds a little more easily.
Neither map tells us much that we don’t already know. That the NYC and Eastern PA ‘hot bed’ has the largest foot print. This ‘wrestling belt’ extends westward through Pittsburgh, Cleveland, lower Michigan and especially Chicago, which has probably the densest ‘hot bed’. MN and IA complete the wrestling belt with more dispersed epicenters. CA and FL are huge states that have pockets of great wrestling. The rest of the map is a little more scatter shot but with some other discernible bright spots. Like, I’m pretty sure that’s Salt Lake City there. Also, the deep south and the southwest remain wrestling black holes.
These maps are definitely not perfect, but it took a decent amount of hacking, and I’m happy with the way it turned out. Pro tip: any set of geocoded data can be turned into a crude, pixelated heat map like I have hear with the help of a pivot table and conditional formatting in excel.
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