Okay, NHL players come from Canada and Eastern Europe, as we should expect because they have lots of ice in those parts. And it’s easy to see that there’s a lot of NFL players who played college ball in Florida, Texas, and Nebraska.
But since different regions of the U.S. emphasize different sports when kids are growing up, are there certain places that produce a disproportionate number of pro athletes in a given sport? I’m thinking primarily major team sports here, since everyone seems equally indifferent to individual sports.
And as a subtopic, is it just my impression that California produces less than its fair share of pros in sports that don’t involve skimming across the ocean?
I think it’s just your perception. I don’t know about other sports, but I’d guess that about a quarter of professional soccer players in the US grew up in California.
California produces more than it’s fair share of baseball players, for the same reason that a place like Florida does - the climate. You can play baseball almost year round. On the college level, the better programs are found in warm weather schools. I follow a lot of baseball, and I see many players who grew up in CA or FL.
For overall geographic selection, you’re naturally going to get more hockey players out of the NE U.S. and Canada, and more baseball players from the southern half of the country.
Basketball and football players tend to come from all over. Once they get to the college level, you’ll see more NFL athletes coming from the major colleges. Most of these college football programs are as big as they are because there are often no pro teams in the area, or weren’t before recent expansion (Nebraska, Oklahoma, Alabama, etc.)
Ok, I decided to go over the Colts roster at nfl.com. (The Colts happen to be on right now.) Of the 58 players listed on the roster 36 included either the state in which the player was born, the state in which the player played high school football, or both. Of the ones that listed both only two had different locations, one of which is of interst to this discussion, and the other one is just wierd. (We’ll go over this in a minute.)
Two players on the Colts roster were born in California, and one of them played high school ball and probably grew up in Nevada. However, we’ll give CA credit for producing 5.6% of the Colts roster. However, according to info at census.gov CA accounts for 12.2% of the population of the US.
Notable overachieving states.
GA produced 13.9% of the Colts and is only 2.9% of the population.
LA 11.1% of the Colts, 1.6% of the population.
VA 8.3% of the Colts, 2.5% of the population.
IL 8.3% of the Colts, 4.4% of the population.
Clearly, just looking at one team’s current roster is not enough to give statistically significant results. This is born out by the fact that as many Colts played high school football in Canada as were born in California, and more Colts were born in South Africa than the state of New York.
Jerome Pathon was born in South Africa and grew up in Canada. He was the one weird guy that I mentioned earlier.
40 players listed. 30 from the US. Of the 10 not from the US 6 were either from the Dominican Republic or Venezuela. Oddly enough, I think this is pretty close to the league average for representation from these two countries.
13.3% of the Cubs were born in Iowa to lead all states and foreign countries.
10% of the Cubs come from both Florida and Illinois, which is about what you’d expect.
6.7% of the were produced in the Golden State, which is about half of what is expected based on population. This is much less than would be expected if you figure in climate as well.
Lance, my man! Great data. Think we can convince somebody around here to do the same thing for all the rest of the NFL teams?
Illinois doesn’t surprise me, since I recall from living in the Midwest for a while that there were a whole lot of great football players coming out of high school there. Georgia does surprise me, but probably shouldn’t because high school football is king all over the South.
And being a Dolphins fan, I’m now real happy with the state of Indiana.
As for baseball, I was figuring about 20% or so were from other countries, obviously where the game has been played for a while. Not always, though–I seem to remember one player from both South Africa and Australia.
But Iowa has more of the Cubs’ roster than anywhere else? Shocking, considering that when I went to school at the U of I, our baseball teams sucked!
Guess that shows you what I’ve been watching, huh?