I started work on the South Carolina High Schoool Football History Site almost 25 years ago before there really was an Internet and certainly before the technology existed for the site and data to be made public.
I was always fascinated with numbers, games, stats, and information on the history of the game. I started researching the information in greater detail somewhere around 1994 or so. Initially, the data consisted of sheets of newspaper, printed out from the Saturday and Sunday The State newspapers.
Eventually, I decided to record the information into a spreadsheet for sorting and query purposes. In 1997 I typed in almost 25 years of data into an old Lotus 1-2-3 Spreadsheet. I had approximately 40,000 games in a series of spreadsheets and eventually had from 1972 to 1997 recorded.
As high school football in South Carolina increased its presence and popularity on the web, I was able to find more resources. I met Gerald Doolittle from Edgefield, SC who also shared a loved for football history. Together we were able to complete the missing 1970s and work towards researching the 1960s. We toured libraries around South Carolina pulling down old microfilm and microfiche and eventually completed from 1964 to present day without missing a single game.
After taking over SC Prep Football and SC Pigskin Prep.Com in 2001, I put the project on the backburner. I would occasionally work on the site and add scores as I found them. Running SCPP and Palmetto Football Talk was time-consuming and I did not do much with the data or with my plans to start a history site. From 2001 to 2006, I added each season up to the current date and also completed most of the 1960s. I also added the coaches section and the player's section as well as the region champions.
When I left Palmetto Football Talk in 2006 I was dedicated to creating the History Site on the web. I purchased the web domain, worked on learning asp.net and successfully integrated the data to a searchable website.
My final goal is to eventually go back and correct and review as much data as possible. There are currently 157,800 games online. There are over 3.6 million data entries now. If the site is 99.9% accurate that still leaves over 3600 errors. I want to go back and find and correct those.
Data has come from numerous sources over the years and obviously, there are bound to be errors. Likewise, newspaper articles are not 100% accurate from the past. I would like to find mistakes and make the data perfect.
If you have any information or would like to be part of our little endevor then please contact me and I will be glad to use any help that I might receive.
Thanks to everyone who has helped in the past and I hope everyone has a great Friday Night Under The Lights.
Dave Pickren
My CMS > About SCFH