The Memorial Begins
There was no master plan. There was a family trying to survive the loss of Brian—and a community looking for ways to remember him.
This chapter preserves the beginning of the Brian Crawford Memorial: the response to grief in 2005, the people who helped create the Memorial Fund, an early idea that did not move forward, and the first documented Brian Crawford Memorial Baseball Tournament in 2006.
Before there was a mission, there was grief.
Brian's death on April 27, 2005 changed the lives of his family, friends, teammates, classmates and community.
In Kenneth Crawford's later first-person account, the period immediately afterward was not remembered as the beginning of an organization. There was no nonprofit strategy and no developed vision for what the Memorial might become. The family was trying to survive a loss it had never imagined.
Kenneth recalls that Brian was buried in his baseball uniform; that the Memorial Service filled the school; that he was told people were standing outside because of the size of the gathering; and that the fire department brought an engine and led the procession to the cemetery.
A fund began to take shape.
According to Kenneth's first-person recollection, members of his fire-department brotherhood helped establish what became the Brian Crawford Memorial Fund. He specifically remembers Justin Dilworth and Todd Evers as instrumental in getting the account started, together with the larger support of fellow firefighters.
At that point, the future direction of the fund was not yet known. It was a response to loss and to a community's desire to do something meaningful in Brian's memory.
One door closed.
Kenneth recalls that the high-school baseball booster club wanted to have the baseball field named for Brian and first asked the family for permission. The family agreed.
His recollection is that the proposal went before the school board and was declined because the district did not name facilities or fields for individuals. This is preserved here as family recollection unless and until a contemporaneous board record is added to the archive.
For a family still close to Brian's death, the decision was painful. Yet another idea soon began taking shape.
“I thought I was building a memorial. Looking back, I was also giving the grief a purpose.”Kenneth R. Crawford • Later first-person reflection
The first documented Memorial Tournament.
The surviving primary-source archive identifies the 2006 event as the 1st Annual Brian Crawford Memorial Tournament.
Lions Club Ball Fields
The Journey account places the first annual Brian Crawford Memorial Baseball Tournament at the Lions Club Ball Fields in Shawnee. The recovered 2006 archive independently preserves tournament files under the “1st Annual Brian Crawford Memorial Tournament” title.
Brackets and operating files survived.
The archival inventory contains age-division brackets, Sunday/final-stage records, multi-age bracket files and other tournament working documents. Surviving records include divisions extending through 14U.
The first weekend did not go according to plan.
Kenneth remembers the original weekend being washed out by rain and sitting with approximately $4,000 worth of trophies for a tournament that could not be played. He recalls moving the event to the following weekend and completing it there. The rain and trophy amount are preserved as first-person recollection.
People came to a ball field carrying Brian's name.
The father's memory of the first tournament is less about paperwork than what happened around it: children played, families gathered, friends helped, and grief briefly had somewhere to go.
The current primary-source inventory explicitly identifies the 2006 tournament as the “1st Annual Brian Crawford Memorial Tournament.” A separate later research document contains an inconsistent reference to a 2005 “1st Annual” event. This page uses 2006 as the documented working chronology while preserving that discrepancy for continued archival review rather than silently resolving it.
Memory and records are kept distinct.
This page draws from two complementary forms of evidence: Kenneth Crawford's first-person Journey narrative and surviving historical records from the Shawnee youth-baseball archive.
The Journey
We Needed Somewhere to Put the Grief preserves the Crawford family's first-person account of the Memorial's origins, including funeral-period memories, the Memorial Fund, field-naming recollection, rainout and the meaning of the first tournament.
Primary-source archive
The recovered Shawnee archive identifies the “1st Annual Brian Crawford Memorial Tournament” and preserves brackets, Sunday results and operating files across multiple age divisions.
Memory is not made to pretend it is a document.
Personal recollections remain attributed. Documentary records establish only what they independently support. Where records conflict or remain incomplete, the uncertainty stays visible.
There was just the next step.
The later Journey reflection is careful not to turn 2006 into a fully formed long-range plan. Kenneth's account is that he knew how to run a baseball tournament, people wanted to help remember Brian, and the tournament gave that effort somewhere to go.
The first event was followed by additional tournaments. Later chapters would take the Memorial beyond Shawnee and into larger facilities, scholarship work, BCM Sports and eventually a broader historical archive. Those developments belong to the story that followed—not to the origin itself.
The first tournament was complete. Then came the second. Then the third.
The next chapter follows the Memorial Tournament as it began to outgrow its original Shawnee setting and the family encountered a larger youth-baseball operating environment.