School: Hanna
Nickname: Miners
Colors: blue and orange
Stadium: Miner Stadium
State championships: 1952, 1954 and 1989
Times worth remembering: The Miners were one of the best teams in Wyoming during the early 1950s, winning titles in 1952 and 1954 and finishing as state runners-up in both 1950 and 1951. And in 1951, the team interspersed 11-man games into its six-man schedule just to stay active and fill out its schedule, and finished 7-2. The Miners had eight straight winning seasons from 1950-57.
Times worth forgetting: Losing is one thing; not playing is another. Twice in school history, the Miners have been forced to postpone entire seasons due to a lack of players — in 1986 and again in 1993. The loss of the 1993 season had deeper repercussions, though, as the Miners went 0-7 in 1994, 1995 and 1996; the squad lost 22 consecutive games after the 1993 cancellation, then beat the Laramie sophomores 12-6 in overtime in the second game of the 1997 season to break the streak.
Best team: By default, the 1952 squad gets the nod as Hanna’s best. The Miners went 8-0 that season — the school’s only undefeated season — and beat Cowley 18-12 in the six-man championship game that season. The Miners were rarely challenged in the regular season, winning by an average score of 43-8 in their first seven games, before taking down the Jags in Hanna for the school’s first championship.
Biggest win: The 1954 Hanna team was solid, finishing with only one loss in the regular season. However, the team that handed them that 50-24 loss less than a month before the playoffs, Glenrock, was the team Hanna met in the Class B playoff semifinals. Nevertheless, the Miners, off the momentum of a pair of touchdown passes by Bill Klemola and a fourth-quarter goal-line stand, pulled off the 21-20 upset victory. The next week, Hanna beat Cowley 33-19 in the Class B championship to claim the school’s second championship in three years.
Heartbreaker: In the world of the mythical state championships of the 1960s and ‘70s, one loss could doom a season. Such was the case for Hanna in 1965, when a 20-19 season-opening loss to Mountain View probably kept the Miners from winning a state championship. No Class B-C schools went undefeated that year, and Hanna — which went 5-1 that year and finished fourth in the final UPI balloting — probably could have claimed the mythical title with a 6-0 record if not for that one-point loss in the season opener.