The Journey · Day 9
When the Memorial Found Room to Grow
Journey Marker: 2010 | Chickasha Sports Complex
Norman taught me that having teams was only part of running a tournament.
You also needed a place willing to let the tournament work.
After the 2009 Brian Crawford Memorial, I started looking for that place.
I found it in Chickasha.
The Chickasha Sports Complex was different from what we had been using. It was a large complex—fifteen fields by my recollection—and it felt like we had room to breathe. I remember arriving for the fifth annual memorial tournament and seeing well-maintained fields, city staff on site and a Parks and Recreation operation that seemed prepared for a large event.
In my recorded recollection, our user fee that first year was about $400.
After what had happened in Norman, that mattered to me.
But what mattered even more was how the relationship felt.
We weren't just being tolerated.
It felt like Chickasha understood that bringing baseball teams into town could benefit more than the tournament.
Families needed hotel rooms. They bought fuel. They ate in restaurants. They stopped at stores. And the city operated the concessions at the complex.
I didn't have an economic-impact model in my hands in 2010. I wasn't calculating multipliers or building datasets. At the time, I simply knew we were bringing a lot of people to Chickasha.
Years later, I would look at that relationship very differently.
From the Historical Record
The surviving USSSA data provides a much clearer picture of just how much the tournament changed when we moved to Chickasha.
The 5th Annual Brian Crawford Memorial is recorded as beginning April 30, 2010, at the Chickasha Sports Complex. The dataset identifies 102 teams and $17,747 in listed team-entry fees. The later Hidden Valley reconstruction calculates a minimum of 246 games from the documented event structure.
That is striking when compared with the surviving 2009 Norman record of 34 teams.
I remembered Chickasha as a big tournament.
The historical record shows why.
A Relationship Begins
My memory of Chickasha is not just numbers.
It is people working together.
The fields were ready.
The staff handled the facility.
We handled the tournament.
And Brian's memorial had room to grow.
I also remember the Chickasha Chamber of Commerce supporting the memorial financially during the early years there. My recorded recollections differ somewhat on the exact amount and whether that support began during the first or following year, so I don't want to manufacture certainty that my records have not yet established.
What I am confident about is the larger picture:
Chickasha saw value in us being there.
That was new for me.
Instead of looking at the tournament only as someone renting baseball fields, I began to understand that a city could view youth sports as part of a larger community economy.
At the time, I thought that was a good thing.
For us, it was.
Looking Back
Integrity of the Game later gave me language for something I was only beginning to experience.
As youth-sports events grow, relationships become more complicated. Responsibility gets divided among tournament operators, facility managers, municipalities, officials, vendors and families.
When the relationships work, trust can make the system feel almost effortless.
But when documentation is thin, that same trust can eventually carry more weight than the system was designed to hold.
I did not see Chickasha that way in 2010.
I saw clean fields.
I saw teams everywhere.
I saw parents and kids playing baseball in Brian's name.
And for the first time since we started the memorial tournament, I felt like we might have found a place where it could really grow.
That is the difference between living something and studying it years later.
The researcher in me now sees systems.
The father standing at those fields in 2010 saw opportunity.
“Chickasha didn't just give us more fields. It gave Brian's memorial room to grow.”
Question for the Reader
When a community hosts a large youth-sports event, how should the value of that event be measured—not only by what the tournament organizer earns, but by what families, businesses and the community experience because the event is there?
Next on The Journey
Chickasha wasn't a one-year stop.
The relationship continued.
And in 2011, the historical record shows the 6th Annual Brian Crawford Memorial with 108 teams, $21,874 in listed entry fees and a later calculated minimum of 262 games at the Chickasha Sports Complex.
The tournament had found a home.
Next came the years when weather, cancellations, city support and a growing understanding of economic impact would teach me what a long-term facility relationship could look like.
Next on The Journey: when Chickasha became more than a tournament location—and trust became part of the operating model.
The Journey is a continuing first-person series tracing the path from family, baseball and memorial work to research, public accountability and youth sports reform.