For years, David Parker traveled to small towns throughout south Alabama on a quest to collect every high school football score in state history.
Along the way, he spent thousands of hours pouring through newspaper archives -- mostly on microfilm -- and methodically found tons of scores. After years of chipping away at his goal, he came to a stark reality.
"I realized there was no way I could do it by myself," said Parker, a Foley resident. "I had barely scratched the surface. It's impossible. It would take 100 years."
That was 2005, when he hit upon the idea of starting a Web site to showcase the information he had gathered and perhaps prompt others to help fill in the gaps.
In 2007, the non-profit Alabama High School Football Historical Society formed and its Web site -- www.ahsfhs.org -- launched. The Web site includes a treasure trove of fascinating tidbits, making it a must-read for football fans.
Ever wondered who coached Murphy High in the 1950s? Or Thomasville's record in 1929? Or which 22 state programs have won at least 500 games?
It's right there on the Web site. For free.
T.R. Miller won last week and Colbert County lost, making TRM the winningest program in state history with an all-time record of 595-282-20, according to the site.
Today, Parker estimates the site includes scores for 83 percent of the state's high school football games, or roughly 130,000 final scores from an estimated 150,000 games by more than 700 public, private and parochial schools.
The site received about 500,000 page loads last month, with 50,000 unique visitors, Parker said. That's triple the traffic it received last fall.
The AHSFHS includes a board of directors, all of whom have helped gather information in an effort to complete the historical record. Others, including longtime Birmingham sports writer Bill Plott and Evergreen journalist Lee Peacock, have helped the effort through the years.
Right now, Parker said, the focus is to gather every score back to 1950.
And that will be tough. Before 1954, Parker said, newspaper accounts of high school football is scarce. Before 1945, according to Parker's research, coverage is virtually non-existent.
There's also the matter of finding scores for teams in the Alabama Interscholastic Athletic Association, the governing body for the state's black schools during segregation. The AIAA merged with the AHSAA in 1968, but many of the state's newspapers simply ignored black schools before that.
When newspaper accounts are unavailable, Parker and others comb through high school yearbooks in search of scores and records. Those yearbooks are becoming increasingly scarce -- especially for anything before World War II.
"It will never be complete," Parker said. "There are schools that just fell through the cracks."
For most fans, that's unimportant.
The Web site gives everyone a chance to walk down Memory Lane by checking on your high school's football history.
And why does Parker do this?
"I just felt like it was something that needed to be done," he said.
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His column appears on Thursdays in the Press-Register.