So, once again following Dominick Ferone’s excellent heatmap of New York, here is the second yearly heatmap of FIRST North Carolina (FNC) district. The map is done by county with numbers of teams indicated on the map as well as on the key. The color coding is arbitrary and designed to give good contrast between different team population sizes.
Here are some of the important stats:
2025 Team Count = 85
2025 Rookie Teams = 13
Teams not Returning for 2025 = 5
Counties in District = 100
Counties with Teams = 41
Teams are still mostly grouped in the more urban counties, with a particular focus around the Triangle area (Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill) and the counties of Wake, Durham, and Orange. There is a secondary concentration in the Charlotte area, focused on Mecklenburg and surrounding counties with an extension into the western counties, centered around Asheville in Buncombe county. However, a concentrated effort by district leadership has helped expand FIRST NC in several more rural counties, nine of which were added this year, though we did lose one too. There is still a kind of east-west split to the district and the events, but with a lot of cross travel between areas. There will be more cross-traffic this year, given the event distribution shown on the map, with only one event in the Triangle (Wake County), three in the western counties (Catawba County, Mecklenburg County and UNC Asheville) one in the southeast (UNC Pembroke) and one east-central (Pitt County.) The DCMP, however, is smack in the middle of the state at UNC Greensboro.
I’m excited about the DCMP move to UNC Greensboro. I think this map helps show that it’s a pretty good compromise for the overall distribution of teams. (Teams like Beach Botz and Coastal Catastrophe not withstanding, but, frankly, it’s not unreasonable to expect them to drive somewhat, being in an extreme corner of the state)
Is the DCMP in Fleming Gymnasium? That was a pretty nice venue when we played the district event there in 2017. Although I would be really excited if the event was at the Coliseum!
As well as the ones above (thanks Christopher1!) there are the heatmaps of New York produced by Dominick Ferone, for 2019, 2023, 2024, and 2025. There are also several heatmaps from the 2024 season inspired by those heatmaps:
This is a trend we should all encourage. It’s really nice to be able to visualize the changes year-over-year of districts’ and states’ representation and team distribution.
It is a little disappointing that there is such a low number of teams in the Triad area (Greensboro, Winston-Salem, High Point). Given the level of industry and population there is certainly room for growth in our area. I know we have been trying over the years to get some new teams started and keep existing teams alive, but we have not had much success. Maybe with DCMP at UNCG, we can get some students and adults from Triad area schools to come out and get inspired to start teams at their schools.
That’s a great idea. I understand Marie’s focus on expanding us into rural counties and growing the district statewide, given how she’s trying to get FIRST NC as much backing as possible and bring in state money to teams. The wider the spread of teams the more legislators she can buttonhole for funding something that’s in their district. But we do need to put the push on in the Triad too, given the lag in team formation there versus the other urban centers (Triangle, Charlotte metro.)
I agree it saddens me to see the lack of teams in the Triad, especially since that’s where my Fiancé is from and she didn’t want to travel far to find a team while in school so she did FTC. Where I was apart of a rural team, where we have helped to start 3 new FRC teams 2 of which are sustained right now.
Ironically our largest sponsor this year has paid a Government Advocacy Group (Lobbyists) to help find more funding for both school based robotics programs as well as non school based. I have been working on an email to Marie about it to get her input to see how we can help FNC as a whole.
I love to see advocating for funding more non-school teams as well. I understand how that might be tricky from a vetting process at scale, but it’s useful to consider that there are many useful programs that could benefit students which are not managed by government-run schools!
that’s my whole team’s kind of mantra right now as we are no longer a school base team as the school kicked us out. So we incorporated a new nonprofit. I’ve started a new FRC team this year revitalized a dying FTC team, as well as started to FLL teams something that we would never have been able to do with the school/school board support.
