My first experience with a Men's NCAA Basketball Tournament Pool was in 1988, when a buddy named Frank White who was in law school with Bill Hale, Ronnie Harrison and some other friends of ours put together a $5.00 per entry pool where you filled out a bracket before the tournament began and were awarded points for each correct pick in each round with the participant with the most points winning all the money. There were twenty of us who entered that year and my Dad won the $100.00 first place prize. We did it again the next year and Dad won again - this is his claim to fame besides being the Yo-Yo Champ when he was a kid and the son of the one and only Checker Champ, Carl Estes Oldham.

Frank graduated from law school in 1989 and I decided to keep the pool going. While twenty participants was fine, I had bigger ideas and thought it would be even more fun if we could generate a bigger pot. The first year I was running the pool, I talked it up with family and friends and was able to muster a total of 65 participants, with my good buddy Mike Cavalier winning it that year after UNLV beat Georgia Tech in the Final Four and broke my Mom's heart (as is sometimes the case, that particular Final Four match-up was the one that determined the winner). Almost all of the participants that year were law students and family members and I hand-scored the brackets and passed-out the results in person after each week. It was great fun for all involved - not to mention a nice little payday for the Ragin' Cajun - and I decided I would try to make the pool as big as I could get it the following year.

Since I had done a good bit of computer programming over the years and saw the power that those machines had to make one's life easier, I had begun writing a program in the BASIC language in 1990 which could handle the scoring for that year's pool rather than Lynn and I having to do it by hand (it took a minute or two per sheet after each round to compare t bracket to the results and total the points and when one multiplies that times 65, it took several hours of administrative time to run the pool). In true LCOPC fashion, I started working on the program about a week before the tournament started and once the games began and it was apparent it was not going to be 100% complete, I shelved it until the next year, resolving to get it working before the first tip-off of next year's tournament. The initial thought process was that I needed to have something to make the scoring easy once all of the data from the sheets was entered and with the limits of programming in those days, I had no practical way for participants to enter their own data.

Because it had been time-consuming to hand-score the 65 entries from the year before, I told myself that I was going to finish the computer program before the next year. Between golfing, going to school and enjoying married life with my one and only, however, I never could find the time to get back to program and before I knew it, the Madness was just around the corner and I would once again be scrambling to finish the program. There were 177 participants in the 1991 rendition of the pool due in no small part to my arm-twisting in the UGA Law Library and the $884.00 winner-take-all first prize money got everyone excited. This meant, of course, that the people would be demanding their results and I had to deliver on time. While I was much further along with the programming than the prior year, I was not able to get everything working the way it needed to before the games started coming fast and furious and I had no choice but to go back to the hand-scoring approach from the prior year.

I graduated from law school in 1991 and a number of my classmates asked me if I still planned on running the Pool. I said that I would as long as there was enough interest in it and so began a journey that lasted more than 30 years and led to a number of operational improvements that had resulted in what participants see today. I have spent hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars to get to this point and participants seem to look as forward to it every year as I do. Following is a bit of a trip down memory lane.

For those young whipper-snappers among us who have never lived in a world that did not include the Internet, life was much different back when I got out of law school, just like it was much different for the generations that preceded ours. The first year out of law school, I ran the Pool through the U.S. Mail back in the days when the mail was reliable. The entry fee was $6.00, which covered the $5.00 entry fee and the cost of there $.33 stamps so Lynn and I could mail out the results. It worked just fine, although there was some effort involved in scoring the entries and tabulating the results. I started my legal career at Andersen, Davidson & Tate, P.C. in Lawrenceville, Georgia and I continued to hand-score the results until I left there in 1994 with the Pool enjoying a consistent level of participation.

As technology advanced, I eventually was able to send reminders and receive brackets thtough Winfax, a software program that allowed me to reach a larger number of potential participants. There was no such thing as the Internet or email at that point in time and I was still receiving a number of entries through the mail. I began working at Cushing, Morris, Armbruster & Jones in 1994 and at some time before I left there in 1998 to start my own firm, I had finally finished the computer program that would allow me to score all of the entries automatically. The Pool had a faithful following and continued to grow orgnically through referrals from participants and their family members.

By the time I started Larry C. Oldham, P.C. in 1998, I had a working computer program and was actively recruiting participants in the Pool, calling old law school classmates and friends and arm-twisting entries over the telephone. I also was receiving numerous calls every year asking if I was still going to be running the Pool and just catching-up in general. I loved this aspect of the process as it allowed me to find-out what was up with old friends, but as you can imagine, it took me multiple hours each March to talk to everyone - a five minute conversation for each of them but five hundred minutes worth of conversations for me. I am not complaining, mind you, but it was a ton of time that I spent every year from when the official bracket was announced on Sunday to when the First Round started on Thursday. and that was just the tip of the iceberg.

With the computer program now doing what it was supposed to do in calculating results, the next problem I needed to solve was reducing the time for data entry. Dad and I would get together for years every Thursday and Friday evening of the Tourney - not to mention as necessary on Saturday and/or Sunday as well - in order to enter into the database all of the entries we received. Lynn would help as well, and there were many times that one or more of the three of us nodded off working or way through the Final Four. I wrote the program in MSDOS and the way to enter each participant's bracket at that time was by picking between Team 1 and Team 2 for all 63 games of the Tournament, taking roughly 3 minutes per sheet assuming nobody made any mistakes. Those were some great times that led to a lot of laughs over the years as Dad and I evaluated each one of the brackets as we were entering the data. He was "read man" and I was "computer man" and although the games were playing on the TV in the background as we sat in the living room over at Mom and Dad's house entering picks, we rarely had time to watch any of them because I knew that the people in the Pool would be clamoring for the results shortly after the weekend's games were over and I aimed to please.

As the years went by and technology got better, it became clear that the real bottleneck that was really causing the time commitment to go "off the charts" was the required data entry by me and Dad. While it was fun, the more the Pool grew in size, data entry was getting to be way too time-consuming for a couple of working stiffs and I resolved to come-up with a better way to address data entry so I could get Dad and I out of that business. What saved the day was me figuring out how to save the MSDOS program as an executable file that I could compile and email to participants so they could enter their own picks and email them back to me. While that method helped a good bit, it was not fool proof and had its own set of challenges, including the data entry program being rejected by some software security systems because it appeared to be a computer virus.

Not all participants were able to figure out the data entry side of the equation and I had no fool-proof ability to insure data integrity, so I often spent hours fixing glitches caused by the failure of the software to error check. As our first two sons, Matt and Rob, got old enough to help me data entry, the Pool became even more of an Oldham Family Affair that now involved three generations. Their younger brother, Drew, got hooked on March Madness and the Pool after his beloved Georgia Bulldogs made the Big Dance in 2011 and he took his Mom's place as someone I could count on to help me with the occasional manual entry of tournament brackets from those who were still struggling with the electronic bracket.

More and more people began to participate in the Pool and as I improved the software, it became possible to expand it while actually lessening the workload. While our boys have given me plenty of grief about WebDecoder over the years, the true break-through came in 2012 when I was able to have one of our first web developers, Chris Barnes, convert my MSDOS program and the logic embodied in it to something that I could make available on the worldwide web. Chris did a great job with the first version of the web-based program that everyone uses today and as the years went by, I had assistance from Paul Carrahan, David Frederick and the man who became our lead developer at WebDecoder, Drew Martin, to perfect the programming logic so that the cloud-based system worked even better than the one that used to run only on desktop machines.

My partner at WebDecoder, Donnie Causey, gave the web-based interface its first face-lift and I learned enough about HTML and the CakePHP framework over the years to make everything look and feel the way I wanted to for the most part. I have continued to revise the programming on the administrative side as time has gone by and Drew Martin has been gracious enough to help me with some of the fine-tuning, even though he hates the way the program has been "Frankensteined" together. Our boys convinced me to add electronic payment methods several years back and doing so has made it easier to collect entry fees and streamline the payment process. I thank goodness that I am able to convince him every once in a while to address something that irritates me and the ultimate goal is to leave the programming in the type of shape that will allow the boys to carry on with this thing years after I am gone. I know that sounds a bit like George and the Frogger Machine, but I would love nothing more than knowing that Livi Oldham is one day carrying on her PeePop's tradition as she becomes the fourth generation of Oldhams to be involved in the Pool.

I thought it would be fun to interview all of the Oldham Family members who have given their time and efforts to the cause over the years - and it truly was - and I put together a video in 2024 which was my 35th year of running the Pool that I hope everyone who decides to watch it enjoys. Family and friends are what have kept this thing going for all these years and they are the reason I look forward to every rendition of March Madness - I trust that most of you feel the same way. I welcome other videos, pictures and posts from friends of the Pool and I will make them available if I receive them.