I am a researcher, of sorts.
For years now I have studied newspaper microfilm in search of basketball and football box scores. I started when I was still in high school, looking up the all-time leading scorers in school history.
From there, it led to looking up box scores of all Tri-County Conference boys basketball games. I started this project about 1990 — the league was fewer than 20 seasons old at the time and I found every box score in league history by looking up newspapers on microfilm of The Monroe Evening News, Adrian Daily Telegram and The Ann Arbor News. For about a dozen games I had to rely on former league coaches, like Bob Henry of Whitmore Lake, Jim Hartley of Madison, Garry Benko of Deerfield and Larry Bruce of Morenci, to help me. They made copies of some scorebook pages and sent them to me. Whiteford coach John Rice gave me all of his scorebooks and I used them, too.
Once those were complete, I moved on to TCC football scoring summaries. Another research project completed.
I have now started doing more detailed research into the history of girls basketball in the TCC. I’m starting a little smaller, trying to collect coaches names and final W-L records for all TCC girls teams over the years and a school-by-school record book.
I’ve received a lot of help from TCC member schools, former coaches and, of course, I’ve done extensive research on microfilm.
All of that research has led me to think about something recently when I found out The Ann Arbor News is no longer going to publish a daily newspaper starting in July: Where will all the box scores go?
Sure, www.mlive.com puts box scores on the Web site now, but what happens when those Web sites purge? Who’s going to be the caretaker of things like that? What if, 25 years from now, someone wants to know how many points their mom or dad scored in a particular game in 2010? That Web site will be long gone and there will be no newspaper microfilm to go to and look it up.
Not all schools keep scorebooks, either. Some athletic directors do a terrific job at keeping those kinds of items organized and filed away. Some schools leave it up to the coaches to do whatever they want with them.
Being from the newspaper industry, of course I’m concerned about what’s happening in Ann Arbor and other places around the country. But, I want to be sure things like box scores are maintained. So, here’s a plea to TCC coaches: Save the scorebooks! Send them to me and I’ll save them for you.
And, in the meantime, I’m going to do my best to preserve TCC stats and history.
