I was incredibly bored so I made this map of FIM Teams by County, thought I’d share here
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This is awesome! Respect to you for going through with this as it must have taken a lot of time and effort.
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We’ve got some “dry counties” I see… Gotta fix that
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And people wondered why we used to have a Championship event in Detroit.
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And respect for including major islands on the map, considering the teams on Mackinac Island and Beaver Island that exist.
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Funnily enough, BIRobot was one of my favorite teams to watch during comps, always loved to see them
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Decent enough population proxy map of Michigan lol
On a different note, that is an interesting map style (country boarders look hand drawn-esque), care to share what software, website, or other means you used to generate the graphic?
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Uh I just downloaded the Wikipedia county map of Michigan, and then imported that into an online drawing software (Kleki), and then using the color scale feature on this google sheet FIM County Distribution - Google Sheets, I filled the counties with the correlating colors, and added the numbers later. So yes this was a manual, very primitive process.
This was the original image
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Interesting that is the style for Michigan counties in Wikipedia.
If you are interested in mapping or cartography more generally I would be happy to share how to mostly automate this process 
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That would be incredibly helpful for a future project I have
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For kicks I pulled some stats from the “dry” counties to see if we can infer anything interesting that might explain why they remain “dry”:
Benzie County -
- Population: 18,223
- Number of High Schools: 3
- Number of HS Students: 763
- Primary Occupations: Healthcare (1223 people), Retail (1026 people), and Manufacturing (810 people)
- Primary Industries: Accommodation/Food/Entertainment ($72,111), Manufacturing ($48,598), and Construction ($46,125)
Branch County -
- Population: 44,985
- Number of High Schools: 5
- Number of HS Students: 1,967
- Primary Occupations: Manufacturing (4516 people), Retail (2546 people), and Healthcare (2515 people)
- Primary Industries: Manufacturing ($325,681), Transportation/Warehousing ($134,455), Retail ($132,242)
Keweenaw County -
- Population: 2,107
- Number of High Schools: 1
- Number of HS Students: 54
- Primary Occupations: Healthcare (145 people), Retail (114 people), and Hospitality (100 people)
- Primary Industries: Accommodation/Food/Entertainment ($12,275), Retail ($2,307), and Professional/Business services ($1,109)
Lake County -
- Population: 12,308
- Number of High Schools: 1
- Number of HS Students: 133
- Primary Occupations: Retail (571 people), Manufacturing (554 people), and Healthcare (470 people)
- Primary Industries: Professional/Business services ($33,214), Retail ($12,787), and Accommodation/Food/Entertainment ($7,925)
Ogemaw County -
- Population: 20,726
- Number of High Schools: 3
- Number of HS Students: 1,146
- Primary Occupations: Healthcare (1416 people), Retail (1223 people), and Manufacturing (807 people)
- Primary Industries: Retail ($90,219), Education/Healthcare ($63,530), and Agriculture/Forestry ($39,638)
Oscoda County -
- Population: 8,311
- Number of High Schools: 2
- Number of HS Students: 599
- Primary Occupations: Manufacturing (380 people), Retail (331 people), and Service (281 people)
- Primary Industries: Manufacturing ($30,069), Retail ($19,151), and Accommodation/Food/Entertainment ($14,644)
Roscommon County -
- Population: 23,633
- Number of High Schools: 4
- Number of HS Students: 1,751
- Primary Occupations: Retail (1442 people), Hospitality (840 people), and Healthcare (790 people)
- Primary Industries: Retail ($91,515), Manufacturing ($61,673), and Education/Healthcare ($38,481)
Data Sources:
- Population: Google / US Census Bureau
- High School Data: Michigan High Schools
- Primary Occupations: The Demographic Statistical Atlas of the United States - Statistical Atlas
- Primary Industries: Michigan Gross Domestic Product By County, 2001-2021
Notes:
- Some “High Schools” were excluded for not being statistically relevant, such as adult education centers or K-12 schools with very small (<20) student populations in high school grade levels.
- Industry GDP is listed in Thousands of Dollars (so, for example, “$1,109” would equal $1,109,000).
- Some industries were excluded for relevance, such as Real Estate (which would be at the top of every list otherwise) and Wholesale trade
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Yup, a lot of those are very small counties so it would make sense. Only one I don’t get is Branch, especially with it being in Southern Michigan.
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That was my thought as well, especially with the manufacturing base there, it would seem like there’s no good excuse. Meanwhile somewhere like Keweenaw county I totally understand.
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What is the definition of Manufacturing? Does it include food/ag processing?
I am sitting in Benzie county right now, my knowledge isn’t perfect, but beyond the sum of few repair shop style businesses the biggest “manufacturer” I can think of off the top of my head is Graceland fruit and Smeltzer orchard.
Almost everything is tourism or Ag here. Population is older thus the healthcare .
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It looks like It HAD at least one team…
Edit:
There were at least two
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Yeah, the original map I made pulled directly from the tba page, which then I was notified by a member of the FIM Discord that there were many glitched teams on the team list, so I went through and got rid of those. This is what the original map looked like
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Manufacturing is broken up into “Durable goods manufacturing” ($4,160 in Benzie) and “Nondurable goods manufacturing” ($44,437 in Benzie)
Agriculture is its own category ($563 in Benzie) though it’s not clear if agriculture processing is included in this category or Non-durable goods. Tourism would fall under the “Accommodation/Food/Entertainment” category.
Full breakdown here: Benzie County Gross Domestic Product, 2001-2021
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I guess what I am thinking of is biggest in terms of size of operation (footprint). High value goods can come from small footprint mfg, so there has to be some smaller stuff kicking around that bumps that total up.
Accommodation/Food/Entertainment being about twice as big as the next two combined seems about right… Benzie being 3ish hours from Detroit, 3.5ish hours from Chicago… Generally speaking there is a reason west Michigan sees a lot of tourist traffic.
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Exactly, the reason I listed both Occupation and Industry was to try to capture the differences between the “size” of a business (number of employees) vs the economic impact of a business in dollars.
It’s also a helpful gauge to guesstimate the potential for mentorship (since people in manufacturing probably make up the bulk of FiM mentors, excluding teachers at least), as well as the potential for sponsors (since a business with a larger economic footprint might be more likely to support a team, regardless of the workforce size).
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Yeah, I guess providing the employment info is about as good as you can do. Categories are broad enough that separability becomes a bit of an issue though.
FIRST does place a lot of need on technical mentorship, so mfg is a decent proxy for the mentor pool, but I am not convinced that is a useful metric when you are only looking at one or two teams. You are so far on the low end of density there will be some technical experience around. Then again it should indicate how easy it is to find mentors when establishing a team, so maybe a useful metric after all.
As far as sponsorship dollars… More opportunities to impress the better, mfg would seem more likely to sponsor.
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