MAPS AND DECISIONS, IV: Club
Data.
Sandra L. Arlinghaus and William C.
Arlinghaus
General
Introduction
Tournament level duplicate bridge is a card
game that is a sport. As is the case with sports, generally,
there is an overseeing body: in basketball it is the National
Basketball Association (NBA); in bridge it is the American Contract
Bridge League for North America (ACBL) and the World Bridge Federation
(WBF) for all nations in the world. The ACBL is a non-profit
organization based in Memphis, Tennessee. The ACBL has about
150,000 members in the U.S.A., Canada, and Mexico. The WBF has
more than 10 million members. The ACBL owns two buildings in
Memphis where they house a large staff to maintain records, databases,
publications, and a host of other operations associated with this
business in the entertainment/sports sector of the business
world. The second author of this work is currently a member of
the Board of Directors of the ACBL. This Board, as do equivalent
boards of other corporations, sets policy for the organization, makes
decisions that affect the entire population of ACBL members, and
oversees the work of the Chief Executive Officer. There are 25
Board members, each representing one geographical "district" of the
ACBL. Thus, the members of the Board of Directors are also
referred to, even though their charge is to represent the interests of
the entire ACBL, "District Directors."
Club Data
Duplicate bridge is played in tournaments that
vary in level from "national championships" to "regional" or
"sectional" championships. There are tournament opportunities
throughout the nation on a fairly regular basis, including
three North American Bridge Championships per year. Regionals and
Sectionals are more frequent and cater to geographic regions more
localized than that of the continent. If, however, one wishes to
play on a daily basis, then playing at local bridge clubs may be an
attractive alternative. Clubs are also often a pleasant place for
beginners to learn, away from the intense competition of the tournament
scene. Aileen Osofsky, National Goodwill Chair of the ACBL,
expressed to the first author a desire to have a map/data system that
would enable her to pinpoint groupings clubs in an effort to more
easily extend
goodwill to newcomers and promote bridge as a sport to younger
players. In this situation the goodwill and recruitment policy is
informed and guided by maps.
- Click
on a
district in the map below and
the list of clubs, arranged by unit, from the ACBL database will pop up.
Use the tabs at the bottom to guide your path through the data, or come
back to the map and click on a different district.
- Click here
and a database
with a filter applied will come up in Excel so the user can sort the
database by any column; click on the down arrow in the desired column
header.
Many thanks to Aileen Osofsky,
National Goodwill Chair, ACBL. Thanks
to Jay Baum, ACBL CEO, Rick
Beye, Carol Robertson, Richard Oshlag, and Ed Evers, ACBL, for
providing
the materials directly to Sandra Arlinghaus, who then created the map
sets
using GIS software (ESRI, ArcView 3.2) that forges a dynamic link
between underlying
database
and outline base map. Graphic adjusments of various kinds were
made in Adobe PhotoShop or Adobe Illustrator.
Solstice: An Electronic Journal
of Geography and
Mathematics,
Institute of Mathematical Geography, Ann Arbor, Michigan.
Volume XVII, Number 1.
http://www.InstituteOfMathematicalGeography.org/