With the addition of two rookies for the coming year, team count in Illinois has grown to 55 with a total of 91 regional plays. Since this seems to be the trendy thing to do, I threw together a quick heat map showing geographical distribution of teams for the 2024 season:
Left map shows number of teams in each county, and includes markers for Midwest, Central Illinois, and St. Louis regionals, as well as R2OC, Roboteer Rumble, and GRC offseasons.
Middle and right maps show where Illinois teams are coming from for Midwest and Central Illinois regionals, respectively. Not too much of a surprise here: Midwest attracts mostly teams from Cook County and the suburbs/exurbs, while CIR pulls from all over northern and central Illinois. Midwest has 31 in-state teams attending and CIR has 28; 13 IL teams are attending both.
Below are some other observations that I thought were interesting or might reflect the general health of FRC in the state:
One notable thing that these three maps together hint at, is that the six down-state teams in Madison, St. Clair, and Jefferson counties do not compete at any Illinois events, instead opting for the much closer St. Louis Regional, as well as one team getting a second play at Central Missouri Regional.
Other than those 6 teams, there are 3 other teams in the state, all in northern IL, not making an appearance at either IL regional, instead opting for Iowa, Seven Rivers, Miami Valley, and Wisconsin Regionals.
In total, Illinois will be represented at 14 regionals:
Event | IL Team Count |
---|---|
2024ilch | 31 |
2024ilpe | 28 |
2024mosl | 8 |
2024wimi | 7 |
2024iacf | 5 |
2024wila | 3 |
2024mose | 2 |
2024arli | 1 |
2025ohmv | 1 |
2024oktu | 1 |
2024ksla | 1 |
2024mokc | 1 |
2024paca | 1 |
202mndu2 | 1 |
Out of the 55 teams, 22 are playing at a single event, 30 have 2 plays, and 3 have 3 plays. Of the 22 single-event teams, 10 are playing at Midwest, all from Cook or the ring counties; 6 are playing at CIR, coming from all over northern and central Illinois; 5 downstate teams are playing at St. Louis; and 1 team bordering Wisconsin will be at the Wisconsin Regional. Overall, the geographic distribution of single-play teams fairly closely mirrors the distribution of teams as a whole.
If anyone has anything else they are interested to see let me know and I’ll see what I can throw together. I don’t really have much experience with GIS/geocoding so all of this was done by a combination of python and Paint, but I’m happy to give it a try.