August 31, 2006.

Following each Vicksburg High football game, assistant coach Jackie Williamson e-mails his game and season statistics to a Web site dedicated to following prep football programs.

Those stats are immediately forwarded to this office. By Sunday morning, every game stat from the previous night is on my desk.

It’s just the latest advancement in a technological world.

It would be nice to say that compiling such accurate football stats 50 years ago was that easy, but of course, it wasn’t.

Statistics a half century, even a century ago, were spotty at best. Most came from newspaper accounts from the game, but even then, space in a small daily newspaper was limited; sports sections were almost nonexistent.

So when sports writer Ernest Bowker pitched a plan to research the history of football in Warren County, it was met with a bit of skepticism.

Bowker, a New Jersey transplant and regular writer for this newspaper for eight years, went on a crusade for history.

He spoke with countless former players, sifted through yearbooks and old special sections. He made a home in front of the office microfilm machine, breaking it a few times, but finding it fixed the next day.

For the really old information, he sat in the Vicksburg Warren County library for hours compiling records, statistics and odd facts.

What resulted is a six-part history – the most comprehensive ever reported in this newspaper – of football in the county.

On Sunday, a records section will debut, and each week a subsequent story chronicling football from the early 1910s to present day.

Among some of the interesting facts Bowker discovered: