Bradshaw Hoops History

Since this is the 15th year for this Tournament Pool, I thought I would compile a brief history and a list of historical winners.

The Paper Days - The pool started in 1993 out at the Jackson Hole Airport when I was working with Delta Airlines. Brian Shelton and I organized the initial pool with 20 players comprised mostly of people who worked for Delta Airlines or at the airport. It was all originally done on paper, and those records are long lost, so I don't have the player lists and winners from those early years.

Going Digital - In 1996, Mark Sigman and I began taking things digital. We were up to 50 players and the paperwork was tremendous, with faxes and handwritten selections coming from friends all over the country. The entries remained on paper while the tabulations moved to digital with TurboTourney. We spent many a late-night Wed. with him reading each entry to me while I put it into the computer... those were the days of paperwork. In 1996 and 1997, we built the first websites by hand-coding the HTML. Reports were exported from TurboTourney and converted to HTML by hand then uploaded to the web. In those days we also had a discussion board with some heated discussion and rivalries, most notably 'Hoop Haven' (Uconn) and 'Coach J' (Duke).

Data Loss - In 1998, I had a terrible hard-drive crash that destroyed most of the historical data from 1996-1998. Therefore, other than the winners' memories, I have no real record of who won from 1993 (paper to 1996) to 1998 (hard drive crash 1996 to 1998). After 1998, I had better backups. TurboTourney also grew up and began producing the reports in HTML and as time went on they also customized the data entry to a web-based input form. All of this has saved me tons of time in producing the site. Meanwhile the number of players has grown from 20 - 200 over the years.

In 2000, Jim Stanford did a great article on the Pool and the tourney for the Jackson Hole News. He took this photo of me updating the web reports and yes, that's Bill Guthridge on TV in his heroic run to the Final Four!

Many of the participants in this pool are friends of friends and people I have come to know strictly through this pool! It's been a lot of fun and I look forward to 15 more years.

The History - Below is a chart showing the history of the pool for which I have records and also linking to the results so that you can see all of the players. Enjoy!

Year	Tournament Champ	Pool Winner	Pool Runner-up	No. of Players
1993	North Carolina	No Digital Record
1994	Arkansas	No Digital Record
1995	UCLA	No Digital Record
1996	Kentucky	Data Lost (Harddrive Crash 1998)
1997	Arizona	Data Lost (Harddrive Crash 1998)
1998	Kentucky	Data Lost (Harddrive Crash 1998)
1999	Connecticut	Shawn Veldhouse	Chris Hale	73
2000	Michigan State	Ed Trigg	Gary Duniphan	113
2001	Duke	Dave Black	Amy Christensen	130
2002	Maryland	Jon Mahachek	Mary Lynn Wilmore	162
2003	Syracuse	Chris Pittenger	James Shell	167
2004	Connecticut	Harv Weisman	Scott Dukes	204
2005	North Carolina	Lane Bennet	Kevin Wingfield	192
2006	Florida	James Shell	Harv Weisman	191
2007	Florida	Shawn Veldhouse	Carl Matsuda	182
2008	Kansas	Charles Gould	Toby Byrum	213