Mapping Out The 2015-2016 U.S. National Team By Training Base

USA Swimming announced its National Team for the 2015-2016 season this week, the team that will represent Team USA up until next summer’s Olympic Games.

With the new list of names officially made public, we at SwimSwam thought it would be a fun exercise to plot the team out on a map, so we can see just what Team USA looks like, geographically speaking.

With some help from Tableau, software designed for visualizing data, we managed to do just that, and the results are below.

As always, these graphs are interactive. Click on any data point to see it highlighted on the other graphs/maps.

The circles on the map grow larger based on the number of athletes training at that location. You can see the major hubs, at SwimMAC Carolina (12 national teamers), the University of Georgia (8 national teamers), the University of California (8 national teamers) and the University of Texas (8 national teamers).

That SwimMAC crew is both deep and talented, with half of its National Team roster returning Olympians: Ryan Lochte, Tyler Clary, Cullen Jones, Cammile Adams, Nick Thoman and Micah Lawrence.

The tabs at the top show other types of maps, graphs or combinations of both. Hovering over any colored data point will show you the relevant data for that point.

Mobile users may wish to view the map in its own tab – you can view it on tableau.com by following this link.

A disclaimer on this data:

All of this data is based on the U.S. National Team roster listed on USA Swimming’s website here. Swimmers are notoriously hard to pin down to one specific location, since many represent one club while training with another. All geographic data is based on the club listed on USA Swimming’s roster, except for cases where we know specifically where an athlete is training.

Another wrinkle comes from clubs with multiple satellite locations, like Nation’s Capital (4 national teamers). In those cases, we chose to lump all swimmers together under one location.

Then there’s the issue of swimmers who recently switched training homes, or returned to a home club for summer after the NCAA season. For the most part, swimmers are listed at their most recent training homes, but again, it depends heavily on what they listed on USA Swimming’s National Team roster.

(TL;DR: If one of our data points looks out of place to you, don’t get mad at us! But let us know in the comments section, and we’ll update the maps when we can.)