VASRA Regatta Data

The Virigina Scholastic Rowing Association (VASRA) is the membership organization that governs high school crew teams for the state of Virginia. It organizes rules and regattas for teams seeking to compete throughout the state.

Each spring, several regattas are held, and all member teams (including non-Virginia teams) are allowed to compete. The report below provides data analysis for the results by looking at the type of events, schools competing, and regattas themselves.

Events

Rowing events are categorized in four ways:

  • Gender of athletes

  • Level of athletes: novice; first boat (varsity); junior boat (junior varsity); etc.

  • Size of boat: single (individual rower); double/pair (two rowers); four/quad (four rowers); eight (eight rowers)

  • Type of boat: scull (two oars per person); sweep (one oar per person)

Regattas

Each regatta contains several races for each event. Depending on the number of entries, each event may have heats and top boats progress to finals, or a single race which is also the final. Each race is 1,500 meters and all boats start together lined up. The first boat to cross the finish line wins. VASRA regatta sites typically accommodate six lanes for races, meaning six boats can compete at a time (thus the need for heats if more than six boats are competing in the same event).

Report in Development

Report Methodology

Results are compiled by VASRA volunteers into Google Sheet documents and PDF only versions. This data is stored in a non-tabular format, with a single cell containing multiple pieces of data, often inconsistent. School names, event codes, boat designations, and more are not uniformly entered.

Example of how results are stored in a non-tabular format.

I combined all data into a single Excel file and conducted extensive data clean-up to standardize school names (using full names instead of abbreviations), event codes, boat designations and more. This Excel file was then loaded into Power Query where several steps of cleaning, pivoting and unpivoting transformed the data into a clean tabular format. Full details of the report methodology can be found here.