Team distances to regionals

[dhitchco]

We were trying to figure out how far-away teams were located to come to the Finger Lakes Regional as well as coming to the RaChaCha Ruckus off-season event....now, I could just look up every team's approximate city address on the FIRST web site and use Mapquest to find the distance, BUT...

I found this really cool geocoder (www.batchgeocode.com) that will calcutate the distance in miles between two addresses. Ok, so it will only give you the "crows flight" straight-line distance, which is somewhat unfair distance for our friends in Canada, but it does give a rough estimation of travel distances for teams.

Check it out to learn more about geocoding.

[JVGazeley]

Any way to work it for non-US addresses?

[Richard Wallace]

The geocoding thing looks cool. I will leave the exercise of applying it to compute total driving distances by regional for another geek. Don't want to hog all the fun myself.

As a rougher basis for comparing regionals on the basis of

Originally Posted by dhitchco

which regional only attracted local teams and which regional was worthy of driving a long distance?

as brought up in another thread --- we could just look at the number of states represented at each regional. For example, as of this morning there are teams from ten states registered for the St. Louis regional. We expect this to increase to eleven or more after second regional registratration begins. However, most of these states actually border Missouri, or have only one other state between.

On the other hand, there are seven Northeast and Midwest teams signed up for the Florida Regional, and some from other Southern states also, representing a total of eight US states -- plus a team from Puerto Rico. So it appears that Florida might be one of the more popular destinations measured by total team-miles.

Florida a popular destination? Gee, I wonder why?