District Stats posts are meant to show how well events are placed based on current team populations.

Let’s start out the District Stats posts with the biggest and the oldest District, FIRST in Michigan.

Name: FIRST in Michigan

Number of Teams 2014: 278

Number of Events 2015: 16

Min/Avg/Max/Std Dev to Event 1: 0.0 / 20.3 / 132.6 / 24.0 miles

Min/Avg/Max/Std Dev to Event 2: 5.6 / 41.3 / 219.2 / 37.6 miles

Warning, Data Nerd stuff follows.

Some disclaimers about these numbers:

They are computed using an approximation of the distance. Without going into detail, the Earth isn’t a perfect sphere. These distances are based on arc length between two lat/long pairs. From your geometry class you know how to find the distance along an arc with a fixed radius right? Well, that’s how we converted to miles. Problem is it’s not 100% accurate, but it’s close enough.

The other issue, these are straight line paths. They don’t account for the fact that there may be things like mountains or large bodies of water in the way.

Article Content Provided by: Andrew Schreiber