Mission Statement

Maybe you've read this before and maybe you haven't, but I decided to revise it the five-year anniversary of the site's founding on fast. So, some of this is old, but a lot of it is new. All of it is important. So read it. NOW.

The origin of the site

It was the fall of 1998. I had just gotten to school, and I wanted to look up the results of a cross country meet we had just competed in. I went to the official website, where to my dismay, there were no proper results. The only coverage they gave was a short article that didn't even bother to give everyone's time and place. My disappointment grew as I scanned the archives, to find that not only did they not go past 1997 or so, but they also were all articles and gave only a fraction of the results that were produced in even that small period. "Geez," I thought, "this stinks! I come to a site to look for results, and all I get is half arsed articles and ads for T-shirts! I could do a better job than this on my own site, and I don't even know HTML!" With that, my mind was made up. At the very least, from now on, people were going to get all the results for every race, without a bunch of hype and ads getting in the way. So on the first of October, I opened a Geocities account and began my first foray into web design.

At first, my goals were modest: to give full results for every cross country meet, plus some personalized biographies and miscellaneous humor. I had no idea how I could cover track results in an intelligible table, and in fact didn't even attempt to do so for about three years. In the meantime, the site grew slowly but steadily, covering all of cross country and biographies of several distance people. Eventually, I realized that it wasn't enough: I had to cover indoor and outdoor track, and include every result I could possibly find; past, present, and future. So last spring, I bit the bullet and went to borrow the results housed in the Media Relations office. They only went back to 1987, but I quickly found out that the rest had been archived elsewhere, and managed to secure them as well. I haven't finished it all yet, but I plan to soon. I hope you appreciate it. At around the same time, I procured a scanner, which I put to good use scanning a large portion of the pictures you'll find.

All of this leads to today. I've got outdoor track, indoor track and cross country results completely covered (or as complete as I can get them). There are good, thoughtful, and in many places laugh-out-loud funny biographies from about 20-30 people. And of course, lots and lots of scanned and digital pictures from the recent past. There's a lot more to do, but there's also a lot that's been done, and I'm (justly I hope) very proud of it. But the question remains: why go to all the trouble? Reporting on current stuff is one thing, but why go to extremes and try to cover anything and everything? Well, for many reasons, some of which I'll try to outline here.

We have done something, darn it

Of all the comments people make about Texas Tech track, there's one that gets under my skin more than any other. I've seen it in print, I've heard people outside the team say it, I've even heard people on the team say it as a way of complimenting the current state of things. It's the simple phrase, "The Tech track team never did anything before (fill in the blank) came along." Um, HELLO? Never did *anything*? I've got thirty plus years of results sitting on my computer, and I don't think there's a single season without at least one result that makes me raise my eyebrows and say, "Man, that's pretty awesome." Don't get me wrong, I fully believe that the system and people we have now are going to accomplish bigger things than we ever have before. But to describe the past seventy years of men's track and thirty of women's track as "never did anything" is not only completely disrespectful to the people that competed during those years, but is just plain *wrong*. We've had five individual women's national championships. We've had a number of multi-time All-Americans. We've had people compete at nationals just about every year for the last twenty-plus years. We've had several dozen conference champions. The list goes on, and in no sense of the word can it be called "nothing". If we've somehow never managed to have a lot of good people in different events at same time, which is necessary for team championships, that's a question of timing, not whether we've ever had anyone good.

So one of the things I'm trying to bring to light is the fact that we've indeed had awesome individual performances, from the very beginning. I want people to look through the archives and say, "Man, Charles Draper was running 1:50 880s more than thirty years ago." "Look at that, we had two women's national champions in 1969." "Maria Medina was awesome; look, a 4:19 1500, a 9:19 3K, and a 16:40 5K." Not only does that give them the credit they deserve, it also gets people to realize that we indeed have a long history of producing great results. It would be much easier for us to get respect and attention in the track community, IMO, if the things we've accomplished were more widely publicized and recognized. Transferring them from a dusty file cabinet to a web server for all the world to see gives me a sense of pride in knowing I've contributed to that effort, in my own small way.

Great or average, they dared to try

Even more than the people who broke records and did great things, I want the site to recognize the people who would probably never be recognized otherwise. Take a look through your 2002 media guide if you have one, and try to find even the name of anyone who graduated more than five years ago, but didn't set any of the all-time top five marks in an event, go to nationals, or win a conference championship. I bet you won't find a single one. Even more telling, go to the official site and try to find any evidence at all that we even had a track team before 1995 or so, outside of some record lists and such. What this adds up to is that probably 90% or more of the people who've competed for Tech over the years are not recognized in any form by the official sources of current info about the team. And I, for one, must raise a rousing cry of "NOT FAIR!"

Let me try to explain this fully, since it's one of my core beliefs about track. Most of us probably take this for granted since we've been competing for so long, but track's an intimidating sport to compete in. You don't have ten other guys, or four other guys, or whatever number cooperating with you, who share the credit or the blame for the outcome. And who wants to lose, or worse, perform poorly, when it would mean embarrassing yourself in front of your friends and family? In my book, anyone who has the guts to step up and run, jump or throw, and risk failing, is worthy of recognition. They competed, and tried to become more than what they were, while everyone else didn't dare. So I try to promote the champions and world-beaters because they bring recognition to the program as a whole, but I derive the most joy from recognizing the people who simply went out and tried to be as good as they could possibly be, even though they probably knew that they'd never achieve much by anyone's standards but their own.

The real strength of the Internet

Getting away from track, I like the fact that the site represents to me what the Internet should really be about. The Internet shouldn't emulate television, and try to be a big money making machine, like every company that's involved seems to think. The real thing that separates the Internet from other media is the ability to present a vast amount of information that can be easily accessed and viewed for multiple purposes by anyone in the world that's connected. Before I put the past results on the site, the only way to find out, let's say, the top five men's 100 meter times for 1985 was to go in person to the Southwest Collections Library, find the box and folder containing the 1985 results, and scan through the full paper results of all the meets, picking out the 100 meter times and comparing them. Now, all you have to do to find the same information is enter the site, click one link, and select the appropriate item from one menu. Simple, easy, and as specific as you want. On top of that, it's much easier IMO to preserve an online copy of a set of results than a paper copy. So everyone that's set a school record this year can rest assured that those performances will remain firmly recorded for them to look at when they're 60. :)

The future of the site

With all of the things I've managed to accomplish in my time working on the site so far, there's plenty more that I want to add before I can consider it complete. Just off the top of my head, here's some of the major things I want to include: A lot of it will be very hard to accomplish, especially considering that I'll be in Lubbock rarely at best from now on, but I'm not going to give up easily. In the meantime, everything's running smooth as peanut butter, with results pages being put up and race results and reports coming in each week and other new stuff as it turns up. I'll do everything in my power to ensure that there's always at least one current team member making updates (which isn't happening right now; would anyone like to sign up? Please?), thus continuing the legacy indefinitely. And maybe someday justice will be served, with the site becoming bigger and more popular than the official site. Now THAT would be cool.

That's about it. I'll put more stuff on here when I think of it, or maybe start a FAQ if I get a lot of questions. We'll just have to see. Bye now.

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