Honing the Edges: Redefining the Borders of Organized Fencing

Abstract

Everything from a paper route to a world region has some form of a border. Those borders may be relatively well defined and stable, as in a country or a province, or they may be fluctuating and vaguely defined, as with an evolving marketing campaign. When changes need to be made, each type of boundary brings its own challenges to redistricting. For political boundaries, there is a substantial geographical literature on redistricting. Geographers have only occasionally assisted in political redistricting work on a large scale, though both Geography and GIS (Geographic Information Systems) are quite suited to this work and GIS is a tool used in many forms of redistricting. This study examines the challenges and potential solutions for redistricting the internal administrative boundaries of a national sports organization, the United States Fencing Association. The Association has experienced a high rate of growth in recent years, and this has led to administrative difficulties due to numerical imbalance in the geographic distribution of its members within the current boundaries. By using GIS software, this study examines possible redistricting solutions that take into account and meet the Association's specific challenges and offers a methodology for use by similar organizations.