In April, the UConn Women Huskies completed a season like almost none other in women's college basketball. Consider the following:
Undefeated 38-0 record.
National championship.
Fourth consecutive national championship (first women's team ever to accomplish that!).
Eleventh total national championship (first women's team ever to accomplish that!).
Did not win a game in the NCAA tournament by less than 21 points.
Won all games in the season by double digits (games against both Notre Dame and Maryland were 10-point victories).
What an exciting and memorable season for the Huskies! Congratulations!
As the Huskies were charging through the competition in the tournament, I looked for a UConn Huskies map. (What? You don't do things like that? I thought, naturally, everybody searches for maps like that!). Surprisingly (or not), I found no maps about the UConn Women Huskies, so I decided to make may own!
I gathered data on the Huskies' past four seasons and began playing with ways to visually tell this incredible story with a fun map of their dominance across an historic run of championships. I played around with using collegiate pennants to show opponents and victories, but it was getting to complicated. I scaled back and showed proportional pie charts to get a quick glance of who they played the most and who beat the Huskies. But that story looked too sparse, so I combined them into what you see here. I added the schedule of the four seasons along the bottom, using numbers to tie the team to its place on the schedule.
For the map, I wanted a low-angle view of the United States. I tried a few perspectives of just the US, but they looked awkward. to solve the problem, I used NASA's Blue Marble imagery and formatted it into a globe (orthographic) projection. It worked great!
I hope enjoy my UConn women's basketball championship poster! Part map, part infographic, all fun!