Brian Crawford Memorial Tournament
What began in Shawnee in 2006 became an annual baseball tradition that moved across Oklahoma, connected families and teams, and carried Brian's name onto ball fields for seventeen annual editions.
This page preserves the tournament as both a family memorial and a documented operating history. The personal meaning comes from the people who lived it; the longitudinal record comes from recovered tournament files and the later event dataset.
An annual place to carry Brian's memory forward.
The Memorial Tournament became a recurring point of connection for the Crawford family, participating teams, coaches, players and communities.
In Kenneth Crawford's later first-person reflections, the event was not remembered simply as a tournament product. It gave the family something constructive to work toward each year and created a setting where Brian's story could remain connected to baseball.
Coaches and families sometimes used the weekend to talk about life beyond wins and losses. That personal meaning is preserved as recollection; the event history itself is supported by surviving records and later dataset reconstruction.
“Parents and coaches tell us… the event was more than just games. It was personal.”September 22, 2026 • Deep Thoughts reflection
The fields changed. The Memorial continued.
The tournament's movement across facilities became part of its history.
Shawnee • Lions Club Ball Fields
The first three annual tournaments were held in Shawnee. The recovered 2006 archive identifies the first event as the “1st Annual Brian Crawford Memorial Tournament.” Kenneth's later BCM Sports chronology also places the 2006, 2007 and 2008 events at Lions Club.
Norman • Reaves Park
The fourth annual event moved to Norman after the tournament had outgrown the available capacity in Shawnee. Kenneth's retrospective operating account describes Reaves Park as the next step because it was larger and better suited to the event's needs.
Chickasha • Sports Complex
The fifth through tenth annual editions were centered at the Chickasha Sports Complex. The Journey describes Chickasha as the place where the Memorial found room to grow and where trust with the public facility became part of the operating model.
Choctaw and the expanding network
The tournament's later operating period connected closely with BCM Sports and Bouse Sports Complex while also using additional facilities as event size and scheduling required. The 2018 dataset identifies nine facilities and 170 teams across that year's Brian Crawford Memorial events.
A multi-facility Oklahoma event
The documented 15th Annual event began June 26, 2020 and included 95 teams across six facilities in five municipalities, illustrating how far the event had evolved from its single-facility origin.
The final documented annual editions
The longitudinal event record lists the 16th Annual tournament in 2021 and the 17th Annual Brian Crawford Memorial Stay-to-Play event in 2022. The archive therefore treats 2006–2022 as the documented annual tournament era.
The documented tournament footprint.
The later Brian Crawford Memorial Event Report reconstructs the tournament series across the USSSA historical record. These are dataset observations and modeled event metrics—not a claim that every dollar shown was revenue retained by the Brian Crawford Memorial.
From the first annual event to the seventeenth.
The event dataset contains 21 event rows associated with the Brian Crawford Memorial between 2006 and 2022 because some years include more than one related event or division-level listing. The annual-title sequence itself runs from the first documented tournament in 2006 through the seventeenth annual event in 2022.
1st Annual • Shawnee
June 2, 2006 • Lions Club Ball Fields origin period.
2nd and 3rd Annual
The Memorial remained in the Shawnee period before the later facility transition.
4th Annual • Norman
The event moved to Reaves Park after outgrowing Shawnee's available capacity.
5th through 10th Annual • Chickasha era
Six consecutive annual editions formed the core Chickasha period described throughout The Journey and later facility research.
11th through 14th Annual
The Memorial entered its BCM Sports / broader facility-network era. The dataset lists the 13th Annual event beginning April 6, 2018 and the 14th Annual beginning March 29, 2019.
15th Annual
June 26, 2020 • 95 teams documented across six facilities and five municipalities.
16th Annual
June 25, 2021 in the reconstructed event record.
17th Annual • Stay-to-Play
June 24, 2022 • the final annual edition currently identified in the longitudinal dataset.
Two websites. Two roles. One historical record.
BrianCrawfordMemorial.com preserves the human story of the tournament—why it existed, the people and communities connected to it, and the annual tradition built around Brian's memory.
BaseballHeaven.net serves as the research companion, preserving the longitudinal tournament analysis, annual source reports, reconstructed event data, methodology and facility history.
The tournament's records later became part of the Baseball Heaven research archive. The recovered 2006 Shawnee files provide primary-source evidence for the beginning; The Journey preserves first-person institutional memory; the longitudinal event report reconstructs the larger 2006–2022 footprint; and the BCM Sports case study documents the operating transition into Choctaw and later facility work.
Those sources serve different purposes and are intentionally kept distinct. A memory is not treated as a ledger. A modeled dataset is not treated as an audited financial statement. A surviving bracket can establish that an event existed without explaining what it meant to the family.
The Memorial Tournament became part of a much larger story.
Years of moving between facilities, building relationships, operating events and learning the economics of youth baseball eventually intersected with BCM Sports, the Brian Crawford Memorial Sports Complex at Seminole, scholarship work and the later Baseball Heaven research project.