How far from home?

Thanks to Jason Bryant’s work collecting hometowns of the 180 qualifiers, it is possible to see how far from home they have traveled to go to school. There is a new tab on this spreadsheet entitled “Distance from Home” that has the raw data. To generate the distance from home, I used the geography tools in Excel to calculate latitude and longitude for the hometown and school of each qualifier. This will necessarily be a rough calculation, since only the city was used and not exact addresses. The distance from home to school was calculated using trigonometry along with the assumption that the earth is a perfect sphere with a constant radius. This gave a value for straight line (or as the crow flies) distance on a curved surface. It is not the same as driving distance.

The average distance for a 2023 NCAA qualifier from home is 167.3 miles. However, if you remove the five qualifiers who are over 1,000 miles from home, the average drops to 113.7 miles. The median distance for all qualifiers is 79 miles, meaning half the qualifiers are 79 miles or less from home. 59% of qualifiers are within 100 miles, and just 16% are more than 200 miles from home.

98 qualifiers (59%) attend school in the same state where they live. There are 25 wrestler who are within 100 miles of school but live in a different state. There are 13 qualifiers who attend a state school outside of their home state. There are four qualifiers who attend a state school in a state that does not border their home state: Jake Burford, UW-Whitewater (Indiana), Gavin Bradley, Castleton, (Pennsylvania), James Rodriguez, Castleton (New Jersey), and Edwin Morales, Bridgewater State (Pennsylvania).

Five wrestlers over 1,000 miles from home:
Christian Guzman, North Central, 1193.5 miles
Donovan Corn, Luther, 1283.1 miles
Coy Spooner, Coast Guard, 1497.8 miles
Chase Randall, Coast Guard, 2242.3 miles
Zayren Terukina, Wartburg, 4007.2 miles

Five wrestlers from the same town as school:
Darryl Aiello, Dubuque
Josh, Wilson, Greensboro
Brandon Williams, Greensboro
Chase Sumner, Ohio Northern
Colby Morris, Waynesburg