Save a Piece of Crew History

I'm appealing to the Crew faithful for someone to step up and save something I think is worth saving.

Several years ago there was a guy named Bill Persing, who was a professor of Meteorology out west someplace. He had a website where he worked on and posted stuff which he found interesting, most of which was unrelated to anything much except his passing fancy.

When MLS started, despite the fact that he knew little and cared less about soccer, he thought it might be fun to track, of all things, uniform numbers.

So he created this database which is almost certainly in some 1.0 version of a mid-90's spreadsheet.

http://persingspieces.com/homepage/mls_nums.html

If you click on a team - like, oh I dunno, the Columbus Crew to pick an example at random - you'll see that team's entire uniform number history up until 2011 when he stopped updating it. Just lost interest I think.

I contacted him around that time and he said it was fine with him if anyone wanted to poach the pages, use them however, didn't even need to credit him, he didn't care, he'd only done it for his own amusement, be his guest, etc.

From time to time I've tried to get various entities interested in saving the thing. MLS wasn't interested, various soccer websites ditto. At one point I tried to organize something on BS where there'd be one central guy who posted the whole thing but each team's supporters would provide a couple people who would keep their specific team updated.

I figured it would take maybe a half hour a year per team. Not exactly a major commitment, but after months of trying I was able to find volunteers from exactly four teams and no one who would find server space for it.

So I gave it up until recently when I learned that Persing has passed. I fear that someday, maybe soon, the pages will be taken down (I think they're on a university server someplace, Colorado maybe) and this information will be lost forever.

Preserving this info will allow people in the future, when the old farts among us are gumming Cream of Wheat, to look at old team photos and identify the players. Once it's gone, that will be impossible.

If this is all pretty stupid, OK fine. Maybe it's just me. But I wanted to take one last swing at it before it goes away.

So I'm asking if there's anyone who would at least volunteer to store this stuff, however that would work. At least the Crew archive if not all of it.

Of course if someone wants to try and make an ongoing thing of it, that would be, I think, a wonderful thing, but I've tried and failed and don't have the skills to do it myself. I'm sure we could reconstruct the last few years for the Crew and, well, if nobody else cares that's their problem.

I even thought maybe #stc might take it on, demonstrating that in Columbus, we honor our history and we're about more than Queso. If anyone wants to pass it on to them, great.

Anyway, there it is. Any comments, ideas or suggestions, feel free. I just fear that one of these days the thing will vanish and that will be a shame.

Thanks for reading.