Indiana high school basketball: John Harrell, the man behind the stats - IndyStar

BLOOMINGTON — So this is where the magic happens.

John Harrell's small office in his house in Bloomington is understated. There's an L-shaped desk strewn with papers, with a monitor and a printer on one side. There's a shelf with knick-knacks, golf balls and picture frames on top, and hats hanging underneath — two Dodgers hats, three hats from Disney World, a Nike golf hat and one from the Indiana Basketball Coaches Association.

A black Callaway golf bag sits in the corner of the room with a club leaning on a table. Another bookshelf in the corner,  holds a Bible, a few books for pleasure, and a plethora of old Indiana high school football and basketball digests. Beige carpet and walls are complemented by a navy blue wallpaper border with golfers.

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His chair is well-worn, the arms peeling. He's on his eighth computer, his second laptop. He's had the same keyboard for nearly 20 years. 

Various reminders of Harrell's work adorn the walls — an award from the Indiana Basketball Hall of Fame, another from the Indiana Sportswriters & Sportscasters Association, a memento from his 2006 induction into the Indiana Sportswriters and Sportscasters Hall of Fame. Not that he wants recognition.

"I've been honored way too much," he says.

The space is a microcosm of Harrell's life, with the perfect balance of personal and professional mementos. He better feel at home here. Over the course of a year, he spends hundreds of hours sitting at that desk.

Harrell, the 75-year-old Indiana Basketball Hall of Fame inductee, has been retired for a decade. He spent four decades as a reporter for the Herald-Times in Bloomington, then called it quits — to devote most of his time and energy to running the most comprehensive high school sports encyclopedia on the internet.

An idea born in 2000 continues more than two decades later. Fans, players, coaches and media can find nearly anything they want to know about Indiana high school football and basketball in one place — from scores updated in real time, to standings, to coaching records and scoring leaders.

In two decades, Harrell says hasn't missed a single day. And he doesn't plan to stop anytime soon.

"I've always said I'll do it 'til I drop," he said.

If he ever does step away, high school sports in Indiana won't be the same.

The idea for a high school sports website came to Harrell after he saw the work of Earl Mishler, a longtime South Bend Tribune sportswriter who put scores on a website. Harrell had worked with Jeff Sagarin to gather football and boys basketball scores since the 1980s.

Beginning with the 2000-2001 basketball season, it became an online venture. He began compiling schedules, scores and records for football and boys basketball, and started doing the same for girls basketball. 

Harrell began the site with media outlets in mind. This was before the days of social media. A small group of fans shared scores on Harrell's message board, which still exists. Today, he has more than 19,000 followers on Twitter. 

"More people have gotten to know me," he said. "It's gotten much, much smoother."

Every Friday night during football season, and each night of the week during basketball season, he'll put final scores on his website as he finds them on Twitter. He uses a dictation device — he admits he's a terrible typist. He's trained it to be flawless in its accuracy — almost, anyway.

"It had trouble with Milan for the longest time," he said. "It can't spell Paoli right."

Over the course of a school year, he estimates he'll input 1,700 football scores and nearly 10,000 girls and boys basketball scores.

He has an Excel spreadsheet with numerous tabs that update on the site. A program on his computer takes the final scores of games and updates a team's records. Not everything is automated — at the end of the night, he updates things like certain scoring records and standings.

 "The spreadsheet is a 10-year work." he said. "I wouldn't be able to do that starting from scratch. I just keep adding to it."

Is he ever worried his computer might crash?

"I have a backup," he says, gesturing to his laptop.

His work doesn't stop when he leaves the house. One year, he found himself in the hospital on the first Friday night of football sectionals. He had his daughter bring his laptop. 

"The nurse said, 'I called your doctor and he said you could go home tonight, but it's going to take me a while to do all the paperwork.' I said, 'Take your time.' I stayed in the hospital until 11:30 when I had gotten all but one score," Harrell said. "I didn't want to miss it and I didn't want other people wondering."

He's updated scores from Lucas Oil Stadium while he watched his grandsons in a marching band contest. He's updated scores from Canada, when his daughter lived in Ontario. One night, he got home later than expected from a church meeting on a Wednesday.

"I opened up an email and a guy said, 'John, are you OK?' He was worried because I didn't have scores out there yet."

There are frustrations along the way. Sometimes he'll mistake a JV score for a varsity game. Sometimes he'll accidentally put in a wrestling score. Schools might tweet out scores from the first three quarters of a game, but never tweet out a final score.

So he'll send out a tweet at the end of the night asking for missing scores. He usually gets most of them. Sometimes, he'll call athletic departments the next day.

It's gotten much easier over the years. He remembers trying to find scores from girls basketball games in the early 2000s.

"I went to the state library in Indianapolis with three pages of the 60 scores each that I didn't have," he said. "I just looked through their old newspapers. At the end of the season, I was missing some scores of games that I'm sure were played. I'm sure nobody ever noticed."

Football Friday nights with bad weather can cause major headaches.

"Some games are getting lightning, some are canceled for good, some of them say they'll pick the next day and then they don't," he said.

Scores begin coming in about 8 p.m. Usually, he's done by the 11 o'clock news. He'll watch Jimmy Fallon at 11:30 and then go to bed. Unless, of course, a score comes in. Then it's back to the computer.

"I just don't want to let anybody down," he said. "I almost never say, 'Yeah, I'll just wait until tomorrow.'"

It makes for plenty of long nights. He has been married to his wife Martha for nearly 54 years. 

"She says I come in here in November and don't surface again until Easter," he said. "But that's not true."

Now that both of them are retired, John and Martha will spend their mornings together. They'll go on dates Sundays. They'll take walks around the block in the evenings.

"I'm so used to it now because he's done it so long," Martha said. "I'm glad he has this to do, or he would just be sitting around. He does it because he loves it."

Harrell rarely sees a game in person. Every so often, he'll stream a game online. 

"Sometimes someone from out of state will say, 'Who's Mr. Basketball this year?' I would just kind of go on what the tweeters were saying, or the people on my message board," he said. "I've identified a few, but there are some that I would not have any idea."

He has his own ratings system that he uses to make predictions on the scores of games, and prides himself on his accuracy. 

"I like the wide open games," he said. "There was a game the other day that finished 108-17 and I had it 106-17. I bet they just saw my score and said, 'Let's try to beat that.'"

He has his opinions about the hot-button topics of the sport. "What do you think of the shot clock?" he'll ask. (Harrell says he "wouldn't mind it.") He'll muse about the implementation of class basketball, and about how it seems like basketball is waning in popularity from its glory days. 

"I'm here to keep basketball alive," he says in jest. But there might be more truth to it than he realizes.

Though he interacts with plenty of athletic directors via email and over the phone, he rarely — if ever — sees them in person. Yet despite his preference for anonymity...

"Everybody seems to know my name," he said. "Someone will find out who I am and then introduce themselves," he said. "All I knew them from was emails."

He makes some money off the site from Google, though he says ad revenue has plummeted since its peak.

"I make about a fifth of what I made in 2014," he said. "People have asked me if I'm going to start charging for it. I've thought about it. It wouldn't be much, because I'd hate to lose a bunch of people."

But for now, it's a labor of love. He can't exactly put his finger on what it is that he enjoys so much. 

"It's in my blood," he said. "When I was working, it was always great to be the first one to see something."

He's had people ask if he could do something similar for other sports like volleyball, baseball and softball. 

"The difficult thing for me is getting a schedule," he said. "I would hate to add another schedule. It takes me all summer and fall to get a basketball schedule together. I don't think I could ever add another sport."

Harrell doesn't know what will happen when he can't do it anymore. He's talked to his son about keeping it up, but doesn't know if that'll happen.

"I don't know if he'd want to do it, but he's said he'd set up a different operation," Harrell said. "It takes up every night. You'd want to maybe split it up with a couple people. It's got to be someone who loves Indiana basketball."

Soon enough, another season will come to an end. By the time the final buzzer sounds on the boys basketball season in March, it will be a welcome respite.

"I'm sad that it ends, I guess," he said. "But I need a break by then."

But then, without fail, he's counting down the days until it all starts again. 

Follow IndyStar trending sports reporter Matthew VanTryon on Twitter @MVanTryon and email him story ideas at matthew.vantryon@indystar.com.