The Journey · Day 12
We Couldn't Control the Rain. We Could Change the Plan.
Journey Marker: 2012–2013 | Chickasha, Oklahoma — Experience Becomes Adjustment
The lesson from 2012 wasn't that it rained.
If you run baseball tournaments in Oklahoma long enough, weather is going to beat you eventually.
The lesson was what happened afterward.
Firsthand Memory — 2012
My memory is that we started the 2012 Brian Crawford Memorial on Friday night. Games were played. Then it rained through the night. By the next day, I believed the fields were unsafe, and we cancelled the remainder of the tournament.
The teams that had not played were refunded.
Years later, the surviving USSSA record shows only two teams associated with that event. That record makes more sense to me when placed beside what I remember happening on the ground.
But the cancellation created another question:
What could I change so one bad weekend didn't wipe out the entire memorial tournament again?
I couldn't control the rain.
I could change the plan.
One Tournament Became Two
Going into 2013, I decided to divide the Brian Crawford Memorial into two events.
Odd-Age Event
5U · 7U · 9U · 11U · 13U
Even-Age Event
6U · 8U · 10U · 12U · 14U
The reasoning wasn't complicated.
If rain cancelled one weekend, maybe the other weekend could still be played.
Instead of putting the entire tournament at risk on one weekend, we spread that risk across two.
I wasn't calling it contingency planning.
I wasn't talking about operational resilience.
I was applying something much simpler:
Experience.
Something went wrong.
I learned from it.
Then I changed what we did.
From the Historical Record
Years later, the surviving USSSA records preserved the footprint of that decision.
The 8th Annual Brian Crawford Memorial appears at the Chickasha Sports Complex under two separate start dates: March 22 and April 5, 2013.
One entry lists $4,356 in team-entry-fee activity and the other $9,327. Together, the historical reconstruction identifies:
This time, those two dates aren't an unexplained duplication to me.
They are consistent with my firsthand recollection that I intentionally divided the memorial tournament into separate odd- and even-age events after the previous year's weather cancellation.
Experience Was Becoming an Operating Model
There is something about this period that I understand much better today.
I wasn't just running tournaments anymore.
I was building an operating model without realizing that's what I was doing.
Every year taught me something.
Norman taught me what it meant when somebody else controlled the facility.
Chickasha taught me what a productive relationship with a city could look like.
Weather taught me contingency planning.
Refunding teams taught me that the financial side of an event carried responsibilities to families.
Splitting the tournament taught me that sometimes you don't solve risk by eliminating it.
You redesign the operation so the risk can't destroy everything at once.
None of those lessons came from a textbook.
They came from living it.
Looking Back
Years later, when Integrity of the Game became formal research, I started putting academic and administrative language around experiences like these.
Risk management.
Facility governance.
Revenue responsibility.
Contingency planning.
Transparency.
Accountability.
But I think it's important that The Journey preserve the order in which those things actually happened.
The experience came first.
The terminology came later.
I wasn't standing at Chickasha in 2013 thinking about reforming youth sports.
I was still a father trying to keep a tournament carrying his son's name alive.
But every adjustment was teaching me how the system worked.
And sometimes the most valuable lesson wasn't what worked.
It was what failed.
“We couldn't control whether it rained. We could control whether one rainy weekend could wipe out everything we had built.”
Question for the Reader
When experience exposes a weakness in the way something is organized, should success be measured by avoiding failure—or by how well we learn, adapt and build something stronger afterward?
Next on The Journey
The two-weekend strategy showed how experience could change the operation.
Then came 2014.
The surviving record becomes simpler again: the 9th Annual Brian Crawford Memorial, beginning March 21, 2014, at Chickasha Sports Complex, with 59 teams, $12,613 in listed team-entry fees and 109 calculated minimum games.
But another kind of change was approaching.
The fields hadn't changed.
Brian's name hadn't changed.
The people involved in the relationship were beginning to change.
Next on The Journey: When the People Changed, the Relationship Changed.