Behind the IHSA Voronoi Map

Copyright SB Live Sports, 2023

Thanksgiving week is a prominent time in Illinois high school sports. The football state championships provide closure on the seasons for the top programs in the state, girls basketball is in its second week of action, and it's the first glimpse at how boys basketball teams will fare as the season progresses.

Beyond the official scorebook, there's another rapidly changing stat that goes underappreciated in boys basketball:

Land on the map.


The Voronoi Map

Who is the closest undefeated basketball team to your county? That's the idea behind the IHSA Boys Basketball Voronoi Map, developed by WIU student Levi Maierhofer and shared on [at]hslogoscom on X (Twitter). 

Inspired by the work of Joey Loose, who runs a similar map for NCAA Division 1 basketball teams, and with the help of IHSA basketball score chaser Aaron Britton, Maierhofer spends his time mapping, measuring, and designing the maps for public display. 


Starting with a map of all the remaining undefeated basketball teams, Maierhofer measures the closest team to each county seat in each of the four IHSA classifications. He then uses mapchart.net to place a team's color into its corresponding "owned" county. Finally, the map is exported to Photoshop, where Maierhofer adds the teams' names and logos to the picture.

"I've been a big fan of high school sports all my life," says Maierhofer, who curates the logo-displaying website, HSLogos.com. "I've done the map project for three years now, and it's been a fun way to contribute to the conversation of high school teams on social media." 

Reception

Maierhofer says that he gets an array of responses to each of the maps he posts on X. 

"Sometimes I'll only get one like or one repost. Other times, the right team or the right person will share them and suddenly there's over 100 likes on the post."

While that's not a groundbreaking number, Maierhofer notes that he finds value in bringing these maps to basketball fans, which he tries to do twice a week.


"It's cool to see a coach repost it and say, 'Check out our team, hopefully we stay on the map for a long time.' Now they've generated more attention to their undefeated program.

"As for the map, the only way to stay on is to keep winning, and the only way to grow is for another team to lose."

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