I am really excited to announce that my UConn Women's Basketball Map has won a commendation award from the British Cartographic Society (BCS)! The award was in the John C. Bartholomew Award category for thematic mapping. This was the first time that I had entered a cartography competition, so I was thrilled when the BCS reached out to me to share my map's success!
The story of how I entered the competition is a little funny. I finished the map shortly after UConn's championship season in early April and had a few posters printed for my personal use. One of the softwares I use is MAPublisher, and it's creator, Avenza, is a sponsor for one of the BCS's award categories. A few days before the end of April, I receive a promotional email from Avenza advertising the BCS Awards competition and encouraging people to submit their maps. I thought that would be kind of fun, so I looked into the submission guidelines: I had two days to get a soft copy and hard copy version of my map to the UK!
I quickly filled out the application form and emailed the PDF. That was the relatively easy (and certainly cheap) method of getting something to the UK. Then I visited my local FedEx Office and found out that overnighting a long map tube to the UK is not cheap. I sent the map away and hoped for the best (but expecting nothing). When I was contacted by someone from the BCS in August, asking if I was going to be attending the Awards Banquet in September, I was excited for what that might mean! Unfortunately, a trip to the UK was neither in my calendar nor my budget, so I had to inform the BCS that I would not be present. Nevertheless, a subsequent email informing me that my map was Commended in the John C. Bartholomew Award was very exciting! I was given an official BCS logo (picture shown) that I could place on all future print runs of my map. With NACIS coming up in October, I added the logo to my map and printed a new copy to take with me and include in the map display.

