FATE OF KHSAA SCOREBOARD IN QUESTION

Frank Riherd, the longtime architect of the Kentucky High School Athletic Association’s online Scoreboard, announced this week that he will retire from maintaining the system effective June 30 after being diagnosed with ALS, a progressive neurological disease.

In a statement released Jan. 10, Riherd said the decision was driven solely by his health, noting that he needs to focus on the time ahead. Riherd has operated the Scoreboard since its launch in 1997, building it into one of the most comprehensive and accurate high school sports reporting systems in the country.

According to a profile published by the Bowling Green Daily News, Riherd’s path to becoming the steward of Kentucky high school sports data was unconventional. He did not play sports in high school and instead gravitated toward music and numbers, taking piano lessons and playing the organ at Glasgow Baptist Church. His interest in statistics was sparked during Glasgow High School’s memorable 1968 basketball run to the KHSAA Sweet Sixteen championship, when the Scotties captured the state title at Freedom Hall.

The Daily News reported that Riherd began keeping statistics for Glasgow’s football and basketball teams the following year, drawn not to the games themselves but to the data they produced. His aptitude for numbers later earned him admission to the Georgia Institute of Technology, where he studied electrical engineering and worked on early data-analysis software.

After an engineering career that took him to California, Germany and France, Riherd returned to Kentucky in the late 1990s with an idea to use the emerging internet to share statewide high school sports scores. With encouragement from his father and support from then-KHSAA assistant commissioner Julian Tackett, the Scoreboard officially launched in the fall of 1997, the Daily News reported.

Over nearly three decades, Riherd refined the system from manually reported scores to a fully integrated platform used by schools, coaches, media outlets and the KHSAA itself. The Scoreboard has logged hundreds of thousands of games and millions of individual statistics, becoming a cornerstone of high school sports coverage across the state.

Riherd said he hopes the KHSAA finds a successor who shares his commitment to accuracy and detail, adding that the athlete has always been the system’s “North Star.