For the last handful of months, I’ve been working with my father’s company, Cercana Systems, to assist with content marketing and business development. In college, I finished most of a public relations degree at The University of Alabama before the first of my two daughters graced us with her presence and we decided to move back home to Maryland in order for her to actually have her extended family in her life. Since that time, I’ve found myself wanting more and more to find a way to help build things that provide a more tangible contribution to the world around me. Then, two weeks ago, I had the opportunity to attend FedGeoDay 2025 and decided it was time to start teaching myself some novice-level GIS skills.
This year’s FedGeoDay theme of “open resilience” brought out a host of presenters that were using open geospatial ecosystems to do highly critical work in disaster prediction, preparation, and response. Everyone there was doing work that was well worth doing.
That brings us to the purpose of this blog post. It is the first in a series of undetermined length about me teaching myself how to use QGIS as a first foray into learning GIS skills. I am a complete novice with no coding or technical background of any kind. My hope is that documenting the process of attempting to make my first data-visualization in a commonly used tool may help others that want to delve into the field get past any apprehension they have about getting off the starting block.
Step 1 – Pick a topic and find data
Initially, I had wanted to create a handful of heat maps that showed the change in the number of youth lacrosse programs in the mid-atlantic over the last 15 years. I turned to Chat GPT to source the data, but the engine was unable to find historical records for me to use.
“I want to build a heat map showing change over time in the concentration of youth lacrosse programs in the states of Maryland, Virginia, Delaware, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, West Virginia, and the District of Columbia. Could you scour the internet for data that I can use for this and put the data in a spreadsheet? The spread sheet should have three columns. The first column will indicate the year, the second will indicate the county, and the third should indicate the number of youth teams in that county. Let’s look at Spring teams only, not Fall, Winter, or Summer. Data should go back 15 years (2010-2025). Let’s consider “youth lacrosse” to be teams for children as old as 8th grade or 14 years of age. Some teams will use the “under X” age categorization, some will use the projected year of high school graduation, and some will just indicate a standard age range or grade level for the children it caters to, so be sure to look out for all of those. Can you do this?”
Compiling a comprehensive dataset detailing the number of youth lacrosse teams by county from 2010 to 2025 across Maryland, Virginia, Delaware, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, West Virginia, and the District of Columbia presents significant challenges. The primary hurdle is the lack of publicly available, granular historical data spanning this 15-year period. While some organizations provide current information, historical records at the county level are scarce.
### Available Data and Resources
* **Maryland Youth Lacrosse Association (MYLA)**: Oversees youth lacrosse in Maryland, offering current season details and age groupings. However, historical data by county is not readily accessible on their website. ([mylalax.com][1])
* **Western Maryland Youth Lacrosse Conference (WMYLC)**: Covers counties in Western Maryland and parts of neighboring states, with a focus on promoting youth lacrosse. Specific team counts by county and year are not provided online. 
* **Anne Arundel County Recreation and Parks**: Provides detailed information on current boys’ lacrosse leagues, including age divisions and game schedules. Historical data is not available on their platform. ([Anne Arundel County Government][2])
* **Inside Lacrosse Articles**: Discuss trends in lacrosse participation, noting shifts in player demographics and regional growth. These articles offer insights but lack specific county-level data over the desired time frame. ([Inside Lacrosse][3])
### Challenges in Data Compilation
* **Data Availability**: Most organizations do not maintain or publicly share historical team counts by county.
In the real world, sourcing and compiling accurate data can often be the bulk of the work done on a GIS project. However the point of this pursuit is to learn how to use QGIS, not spend countless hours calling up the Parks and Rec department of every county in the Mid-Atlantic, so I decided to pivot to something else.
So now, I’m looking for historical data over the last 15 years on the blue crab population in various sections of the Chesapeake Bay estuary. My new goal will be to create one map that shows the places where the population has increased the most, increased the least, and even decreased since 2010.
This information was readily available from Maryland’s Department of Natural Resources, with one caveat.
There was plenty of data on blue crab population available, but I wasn’t finding any that was split up into certain regions of the bay. Nonetheless, creating the map and shading the entire Bay based on percent change in population density from the median of the data year-to-year is a good beginner project to learn anything about QGIS at all, so we’re rolling with it.
Step 2 – Installing QGIS
While it may seem like a silly step to document, this is supposed to be a properly novice guide to making a map in QGIS, and it’s a touch difficult to do that without installing the program. The machine I’m using is a 2020 M1 Macbook Air running Sonoma 14.6.1. I downloaded the installer for the “long term” version of QGIS from qgis.org, went through the install process, and attempted to open it.
Naturally, my Macbook was less than thrilled that I was attempting to run a program that I hadn’t downloaded from the app store. It was completely blocking me from running the software when I opened it from the main application navigation screen. This issue was resolved by going to the “Applications” folder in Finder and using the control+left click method. A warning popped up about not being able to verify that the application contained no malware, I ran it anyway, and I have not had any issues opening the application since then.
The next step will be to actually crack QGIS open and begin creating a map of the Chesapeake Bay.
