Sports are geographic activities. In which cities are specific teams located, and why? How do radio and television stations decide which teams to broadcast? Where do each home team’s fans live? How can team owners and business managers establish marketing campaigns for ticket sales based on customer characteristics? How and where can players be recruited from? In which cities and in which neighborhoods are sports facilities located? What particular businesses are located near a sports facility, and why? How can parking and security be managed at sporting events? How can weather and air pollution be monitored for upcoming events? How can bicycle, sailboat, and running routes be organized and tracked? Because they are geographic activities, GIS can be used in sports from the global scale, such as choosing a city for the next Olympics, to the local scale, such as tracking a soccer player’s location throughout a game.

In a book entitled Sports Geography, author John Bale explores the geographical diffusion of modern sport, its economic impact, cultural geographies of sport, and landscape, place, and location. The book is available through Routledge and online through Google books.

An article in Sports Illustrated a few years ago gave an excellent overview of the power of mapping and GIS in sports, as summarized in Directions magazine as follows: http://www.directionsmag.com/printer.php?article_id=742

Several lessons on the ArcLessons site (http://www.esri.com/arclessons) invite students to dig into countries who participated in the Olympics and where the award winners were from.

Fenway Park, Boston Massachusetts USA, part of a GIS-based lesson about the World Series of baseball, on: http://gis.esri.com/industries/education/arclessons/search_results.cfm?id=334. This lesson invites exploration of the different zones in a baseball stadium, studying the direction the players face, and measuring distances on a field, using data from two different stadiums. This lesson can be modified for use in football, soccer, rugby, lacrosse, track, swimming, or other sports.

Be creative and use sports to help your students see the advantage of the geographic approach and dig into GIS-based analysis beginning with a topic that is already interesting to them.

- Joseph Kerski, ESRI Education Manager