I am super excited to announce a new feature on this website that focuses on the geography of college recruiting! Last summer, I not only started working with the NCAA volleyball stats, but I also scraped and processed the data from every Division I collegiate volleyball’s team websites! Some parts of the data, like player names, positions, and graduation year overlap with the NCAA stats archive I already have, but almost all of the colleges’ volleyball websites have additional data that the NCAA does not have, like a player’s high school and home town. While many colleges format their athletic websites and roster information similarly, others have their own distinct systems, which made scraping and processing the data on those websites more complicated and time intensive.
With that being said, I am happy to report that the scraping and processing of the Division 1 team rosters from 2013-2023 is nearly complete! This means that I will be able to share more posts about the geographical aspects of where colleges are recruiting athletes. To start us off, I have shared some original data visualizations of where domestic student athletes come from for each D1 school! These are all linked under the Div I section of this website, and are sorted based on conference!
Here are a few examples of what you can find:
2013-2023 Pac-12 Student-Athlete Hometowns
2013-2023 Ivy League Student-Athlete Hometowns
2013-2023 Creighton Student-Athlete Hometowns
Data Notes:
- I am launching this feature with still a little bit of work to do: there are some of the schools that transitioned into D1 during this period that I haven’t completed the scraping and processing of, and I will be doing more data quality checks. So nothing should be treated as final.
- Most DI teams list high school attended for their students-athletes. For most student-athletes, we were able to identify their high schools’ addresses, and used a mapping program to identify the latitudes and longitudes for those addresses. This is what is included on the maps.
- I ‘relocated’ student athletes from Alaska and Hawai’i so that they could also be on maps of the lower forty-eight states. If we included Alaska and Hawai’i to scale and in their actual relative distances from the rest of the country, the scale of the maps would allow for much less detail and overall the visualizations would be less effective.
- As of the writing of this post, not all of the maps are up on VolleyBTN yet. I have to load each one individually, so they’ll be rolling out over the next few days by conference.
- I will be writing articles that leverage these data and present some of the interesting things about the geography. First to come will be a post about the Pac 12.
- Just like I did with the NCAA Stats, I will be doing DIII also! But, it will take some time—the data scraping, processing and cleaning really is not a very fast process.
- Photo Credit: Header photo from Creighton University Athletics