09/27/2026
The Brian Crawford Memorial website has been updated.
For those who have followed our family and Brian’s memorial over the years, I want to share something that has been a long time coming.
I’ll be the first to admit that I haven’t done a very good job of keeping Brian’s memorial website updated. Over the last few years—especially since 2023—so much of my time has gone into research, documenting the journey, and working on my book, Integrity of the Game vs. Economic Impact (Politics): The Oklahoma Business Plan.
But while working on Brian’s website these past few days, something became very clear to me:
I have spent years documenting pieces of the story without always doing a good job of showing people how all of those pieces fit together.
For many people, Brian Crawford’s name may be connected to the Brian Crawford Memorial Baseball Tournament.
For others, it may be the Brian Crawford Memorial Sports Complex in Seminole, Oklahoma, or Brian Crawford Field in Prague, Oklahoma.
Others may remember the Brian Crawford Memorial Scholarship and the young people we have been able to recognize and support in Brian’s name.
Some remember BCM Sports and the tournaments, leagues, officials, coaches, players and families who were part of that chapter.
And more recently, people may know my work through Baseball Heaven—the research, public records, case studies, and the work that has gone into Integrity of the Game vs. Economic Impact (Politics): The Oklahoma Business Plan.
But those aren’t separate stories.
They all started with Brian.
After we lost Brian in 2005, our family tried to find a way to keep his memory alive.
What began as a memorial became a tournament. The tournament grew. A scholarship created another way to carry Brian’s name forward by investing in young people. BCM Sports became something much larger than we ever could have imagined in those early days. Along the way, Brian’s name became permanently connected to places where kids could play the game he loved—the Brian Crawford Memorial Sports Complex in Seminole and Brian Crawford Field in Prague.
Those experiences also changed me.
Over the years, I began asking deeper questions about youth sports, community programs, public facilities, tournament operations, economics, and whether decisions being made around the game were actually serving the kids and communities the game was supposed to serve.
Those questions eventually became Baseball Heaven, my research, and the book I am working to complete today.
Recently, I also started writing a Baseball Heaven blog called The Journey.
The Journey is different from the research reports and case studies. It is my attempt to go back through this story from the beginning—to document the people, places, decisions, successes, mistakes, relationships and experiences that brought us from 2005 to where we are today.
In many ways, writing The Journey is what has made me realize just how connected all of this really is.
More than 20 years later, I think I finally understand that these three websites tell different chapters of one story:
❤️ BrianCrawfordMemorial.com — Brian, his life, his family, his memory, the memorial tournament, the scholarship, and the places that carry his name.
⚾ BCMSports.net — what grew from that memorial and the years we spent trying to serve kids, families and communities through sports.
📚 BaseballHeaven.net — where those experiences eventually led me: research, documentation, public accountability, Integrity of the Game vs. Economic Impact (Politics): The Oklahoma Business Plan, and now The Journey, where I am going back and telling the story of how we got here.
If you haven’t visited Brian’s memorial website in a while, I hope you’ll take a few minutes and look through it again:
BrianCrawfordMemorial.com
And if you want to follow the story as I continue documenting it, you can follow The Journey here:
BaseballHeaven.net/category/the-journey/
There are photographs, stories, history and memories throughout these sites that help explain something I probably haven’t explained well enough over the years:
The tournament was never the whole story.
The scholarship was never the whole story.
The sports complex was never the whole story.
Brian Crawford Field was never the whole story.
BCM Sports was never the whole story.
The research, the book and The Journey aren’t the whole story either.
They are chapters.
For a long time, I think I was so busy living each chapter—and later trying to document it—that I didn’t always see the entire story myself.
Now, more than two decades later, when I put all of those chapters beside one another, the connection becomes pretty simple:
Brian is the reason there was ever a story to tell.
Thank you to everyone who has remembered Brian, supported our family, contributed to the scholarship, played in a memorial tournament, coached a team, umpired a game, volunteered, donated, shared a memory, or simply continued saying his name over these past 21 years.
That has always mattered more than you probably know.
Brian Allen Crawford
1987–2005
#13
Forever remembered. Still making a difference.
www.BrianCrawfordMemorial.com
Brian Crawford Memorial
