The Journey · Day 10
When Trust Became Part of the Operating Model
Journey Marker: 2011 | Chickasha, Oklahoma
By the time we returned to Chickasha for the sixth Brian Crawford Memorial Tournament, something had changed.
The first year there had been about finding a place to play.
The second year felt more like we had found a partner.
I remember the relationship with Chickasha Parks and Recreation as a good one. The fields were maintained. The city operated the complex and concessions. We organized the tournament and brought the teams.
And there were a lot of teams.
I wasn't sitting there in 2011 thinking about governance models or public-private relationships. I was thinking about schedules, baseballs, umpires, brackets and whether we could get more than a hundred teams through a weekend without something going sideways.
But something else was happening around us.
The city and the community seemed to recognize that those teams brought people with them.
Parents. Brothers and sisters. Grandparents. Hotel stays. Restaurant meals. Gasoline purchases.
At the time, I didn't need a spreadsheet to understand that.
You could see it.
From the Historical Record
The surviving USSSA record identifies the 6th Annual Brian Crawford Memorial as beginning May 6, 2011, at the Chickasha Sports Complex. It records 108 teams and $21,874 in listed team-entry fees. The later Hidden Valley reconstruction calculates a minimum of 262 games from the documented event structure.
That meant the tournament had grown again from the 102 teams recorded the previous year.
The record gives me something today that I didn't fully appreciate then: scale.
More than a hundred teams were no longer an experiment.
Brian's tournament had become an established event.
More Than a Rental
My recollection is that we paid about $400 to use the Chickasha complex our first year there.
After that, the relationship changed.
In my recorded oral history, I remembered that we were not charged a facility fee for the following years because of what the tournament was bringing into the community.
I also remembered the Chickasha Chamber of Commerce providing sponsorship support.
My recordings are not perfectly consistent on the exact amount of that sponsorship.
In one recollection, I described it as somewhere between $1,000 and $1,500, possibly around $1,300.
That distinction matters to me now.
I could simply choose one number and tell the story more cleanly.
But that wouldn't be the point of The Journey.
The honest version is this:
I remember the support.
I remember the relationship.
I remember the city seeing value in the tournament.
I don't yet have the contemporaneous record in front of me that establishes the exact sponsorship amount.
Twenty years later, that difference between remembering something and documenting it has become one of the central lessons of my research.
Then Came the Things You Couldn't Control
A tournament can be perfectly organized on paper and still be defeated by Oklahoma weather.
During our Chickasha years, I remember dealing with rain, snow, extreme wind, tornado-related problems, power outages, postponements and rescheduling.
I am not assigning all of those events to 2011 specifically; they accumulated across our years there.
But those experiences changed the way I looked at a facility relationship.
When something went wrong, you needed more than fields.
You needed people willing to work with you.
That required trust.
Looking Back
Years later, Integrity of the Game would make me question systems that depend too heavily on informal trust.
That doesn't mean trust is bad.
Quite the opposite.
Trust was one of the reasons Chickasha worked so well for us.
But research taught me that as events become larger, good relationships should be supported by good records.
Who is responsible for the facility?
Who collects which revenue?
What happens if weather cancels the weekend?
What does the agreement actually say?
The book eventually framed that principle much more formally: systems built on trust alone become vulnerable as scale increases, and clear roles and reporting make accountability stronger without destroying relationships.
I didn't know any of that language in 2011.
I knew something much simpler.
We trusted Chickasha.
They trusted us.
And Brian's tournament kept growing.
“Back then, trust felt like the agreement. Years later, I learned why the agreement should protect the trust.”
Question for the Reader
When a community organization and a public facility have a strong relationship, does putting expectations in writing weaken that trust—or is documentation actually one of the best ways to preserve it?
Next on The Journey
The next year presents a different kind of challenge.
The surviving 2012 USSSA record contains only two teams and $395 in listed entry fees for an event carrying the Brian Crawford Memorial name at Chickasha.
I don't want to assume that surviving record tells the complete story.
So the next installment will deal with something that has become just as important to this journey as finding records:
recognizing when the record itself may be incomplete.
Next on The Journey: When the Numbers Don't Tell the Whole Story.
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.