“No Parents Please, Just the Coaches”: How Track Rankings Used to Work

Today’s track rankings are volunteer snapshots — compiled once or twice a season, posted as PDFs, doubling as regional seeding lists. But rewind to 2014 and you’ll find something better: a weekly labor of love, updated every Sunday afternoon by a coach named Johnny Crabtree of Haworth, and governed by the greatest sentence in Oklahoma track history.

“If I miss one of your athletes COACH please email me at jcrabtree@haworth.k12.ok.us and I will add it for the next week. No parents please, just the coaches.”

Read it again. Savor it. In an era before every parent had a MileSplit account and a grievance, the 2A boys’ rankings ran on coach-submitted marks, Sunday updates, and a strict no-parents policy. Only results posted to the ohstrack website counted. Miss the Sunday deadline and your kid waited a week. Crabtree wasn’t running a democracy; he was running a rankings sheet, and the sheet had rules.

The artifacts are glorious. Times were typed with colons where the decimals belong — 10:94, 22:13, 2.02:53 — a formatting chaos that somehow never caused a controversy, probably because everyone understood the assignment. The final edition each season came with a sign-off in all caps: “THIS IS THE FINAL RANKINGS I WILL DO THIS SEASON.” You can hear the Sunday-afternoon exhaustion in it.

Compare that to now: image-only PDFs, posted who-knows-when, invisible to search engines (see our 2024 investigation). The Crabtree era had worse technology and better distribution — a text page, updated weekly, that anyone could read and argue about. Progress isn’t always progress. Somewhere out there, a coach is still doing Sunday-afternoon updates in his head. This one’s for him.

Source: ohstrack.com legacy rankings archive — “Outdoor Best Performances, 2A Boys 2014,” compiled by Johnny Crabtree.