We did this at our paper a couple years ago. Sit a spell, and let me tell you my tale of woe...
It started with an all-time, all-county team from the last 50 years. We tracked down old players, researched some stats, and came up with a ballot for every decade. We let readers vote on it, and it was a pretty popular thing.
After it was done, though, I realized how incomplete it was. We heard stories about guys we never found in the research (we threw it together in a couple weeks) and stats were either wrong or woefully incomplete. So over the Christmas holiday, when things were slow, I started digging. Went through the old bound volumes to compile team records. Then started on the single-season and career records. Eventually, it developed into a kamikaze mission.
I was going to do a single-game record search.
That meant going through every game ever played in our county, that there was a record for. At any given time, there were between four and six teams to research. So it was 40-60 games a year to track down.
The first 20 years were a breeze. Open a bound volume, rifle through September, October and November, take notes.
Then it was time to hit the microfilm. I broke the machine a couple times. Burned out relays that hadn't been used in 10 years. Even had to dig up a replacement bulb from the supply closet. Thing had likely been there since 1983. Our paper's film went back to the early 50s, then it was off to the library. Every slow week, and a good portion of the summer, were spent hunched over that damn microfilm machine for 2 or 3 hours a day. I gained the superhuman ability to thread a microfilm machine in 2.4 seconds. I could finish off an entire season of research in about an hour.
And I nearly went insane. Words blurred together. I'd be making love to my wife and blurt out, "Did you know Jimmy Tailback at Podunk High rushed for five touchdowns in a game against Crotchtown in 1955? Then, two weeks later, he had six against Shelbyville!" I was like an idiot savant. Like a high school football version of Rain Man.
The records just kept going further and further back in time. Every time I fired up the microfilm, I felt like the guy in the H.G. Wells story. Time and space distorted. Everything turned a weird shade of sepia. Old-timey headlines appeared and disappeared (My favorite was "Podunk beaten by deaf and dumb team").
1940. 1930. 1925. 1923. 1922 ... wait a second. No games in 1922? Let me check 1921 ... nothing!
I was finally done. I let out a Tiger Woods like fist pump that nearly got me tossed out of the library. A few more checks of yearbooks revealed a few games in the mid-teens, but nothing major. After eight months I was finally done. And I say "I" because it was all me, baby. No help from anyone else.
The project was really started just for in-house use. I got tired of someone saying "That's a school record!" and not really knowing for sure. It ended up as a countywide record book that spans a century, ended up becoming an annual feature in our tab, and has been wildly popular. Every now and then, I'll be at one of the schools and someone will mention how their stud running back has X amount of yards, and needs X amount to pass someone on the career list. Or someone else caught seven passes last week, and only needed a couple more for the single-game record.
That makes me smile.
I wrote a five- or six-part series, each part a 50-to-60 inch epic, about the history of football in the county that was largely a rehash of everything I had worked on. I wrote 75 percent of it from memory.
And over the last few years we've gotten a couple dozen regular stories out of it about current players who are approaching milestones or setting records. It's been an invaluable resource.
Anyway, it's a worthwhile project. Just be careful. You can get wrapped up in it and lose your mind. Consider me the old-time grizzled prospector warning you about gold fever.
