JOHN HARRELL says he’s a poor interviewee. Of course he would. On the surface, he is a historically quiet person. A man of few words. But the work he pours himself into speaks volumes about him.
In the world of high school football and basketball in Indiana, Harrell is the most famous guy you’ve never heard of, but the results of his diligent, selfless work are used and digested by a wide variety of people all over the state.
Harrell gathers and publishes schedules, posts weekly results, and compiles sports stats for high school football and boys’ and girls’ basketball. Not just for one team or conference, but for every team in the state.
Harrell says he began keeping stats after obtaining his first computer in 1984. In 1980, Jeff Sagarin, a computer guru developing algorithms to rank college football and basketball teams, spoke in Bloomington, and legendary Bloomington Herald-Times sports editor Bob Hammel, a friend and mentor of Harrell, suggested they do the same with high school sports in Indiana. That’s when Harrell went all in on the project, and he hasn’t slowed down since. In 2023, Sagarin retired his long-running Sagarin Ratings in USA Today, where the predictions were correct nearly 75 percent of the time.
“That’s how I got connected to him and began collecting stats,” says Harrell.
In 2000, Harrell launched his own web page. “[My website] went pretty well for a while, then everybody started doing this.” But with the backing of the Indiana High School Athletic Association, Harrell’s website became the gold standard of all things statistics. And the reason for doing this?
“I like putting things out there that people haven’t heard. Every night, I feel, is new things to know. I like being the first to know, I guess. Always have.”
“I got tied into journalism early on and knew that’s what I wanted to do. I don’t know what I’d be doing now.”
Despite earning a math degree from Huntington University, Harrell worked briefly for the Fort Wayne News-Sentinel following graduation before settling in Bloomington, where he spent the next 40 years of his career working as copy and desk editor while also collecting stats and scores.
“I covered some schools, but I liked the copy desk. I kind of enjoyed statistics,” he says.
But after four decades of the daily grind, enough was enough.
“I don’t miss anything about newspapers, and I really thought I would,” Harrell says. “When you work on a paper, it seems like there is pressure all the time, especially on deadline. I still do have that deadline on Tuesday and Saturday nights during basketball, that’s a little crazy.”
He says changes to newspapers, their staffs, and local game coverage are what finally led him to leave. “I got out of newspapers in 2011, and I got out at the right time. I could see what was happening.” But he dug his heels deeper into his project.
“Someone once said he doesn’t understand why I don’t have scores for two to three days,” Harrell once wrote on Twitter (now X). “My answer: I don’t understand why I don’t have scores within 5 minutes after the end of each game. Nowadays, I would say 5 seconds. A scorekeeper is right there. He has a phone in his hand. Why not use it? People, we’ve lost all the reporters who used to send out scores. They are gone, and they’re not coming back. Someone else needs to make an effort and take up the slack.”
That’s where he comes in. He takes up the slack.
Now 79 years old, he vows to “keep doing this until I drop. People ask me when I give it up; they are ready to pick it up. That’s a nice feeling.”
Harrell has many awards and is in multiple halls of fame for his work, most notably the Indiana Basketball Hall of Fame.
