A path seldom traveled

MONAHANS Larry Hanna isn’t the old ball coach.

Because when the school board fires the old ball coach, he and his wife neatly pack the dishes wrapped in the newspaper articles that once glorified his playoff runs.

They leave town with a cardboard box filled with the playbook and VHS tapes of the 1996 state championship game and that whooping his team put on No. 1-ranked Breckenridge for the 1998 regional title.

The old ball coach doesn’t accept a career overhaul. He keeps hopping across the Texas desert believing a district title is just over that sand hill.

A coaching buddy has a safety net job as an assistant at some Class 5A school to hold him over, or the old ball coach steps down a classification and attempts to turn around his reputation and his resume with some Ws and a golden football trophy or two.

Hanna, in his heart and in his mind, is still a football coach, but he has never been the old ball coach since Monahans-Wickett-Pyote Independent School District fired him in January 2005 after a 4-6 season.

Heck, Hanna isn’t a coach at all. He’s a Ward County Commissioner, a 54-year-old elected official in the same community where a school board showed him the exit.

And believe Larry Hanna when he says that being chosen to lead this community again uplifted his spirit and ignited his wife’s enthusiasm dormant nearly two years.

The layoff admittedly crushed the Hannas. A demotion transformed Larry Hanna from the district’s athletic director to an elementary physical education teacher.

“I can’t help but take it personally,” Larry Hanna said. “Coming back and getting elected county commissioner helped rectify that.”

In a 30-minute interview, Hanna’s wife, Judy, said the word “hurt” 13 times about the experience. She also apologized profusely for still crying over the experience.

Judy felt the pain.

“Really, really, really, really bad,” she said.

But Larry Hanna didn’t leave.

Nope.

It was an investment of time and sacrifice, he said.

“My loyalty was with Monahans,” he said.

Yeah, he applied for other Class 3A head coaching jobs, but none bit on the recently fired coach.

And Hanna didn’t take an assistant coaching job. He stayed just as he and his wife said they would for those eight years he was the Loboes head coach and athletic director.

Larry Hanna spent nine other years as an assistant coach here as well.

They had roots.

“We like the people, and we like the town,” Judy said. “We don’t have our home paid for, but we had a house we liked. We liked our church, too. We had too many ties.”

It’s just when a football coach says he wants to stay no one really believes him. Again, just over that sand hill is a higher-paying, bigger-profile, more tradition-rich program.

Or maybe the community doesn’t want him to stay because, after all, he went two games under .500 in his final season.

But if the coach settles down and takes root in the town that seemingly once didn’t want him, maybe he can enrich their lives through a different form of community service.

“He was really serious about being part of the community long term,” Ward County Judge Greg Holly said of Hanna, “and he really does want what’s best for the community.”

The community healed. As did Hanna. It took cold calls on his neighbors and a runoff election.

“Sticking around, campaigning and going door to door and seeing their reaction, it did a lot for my wife and I,” Hanna said. “If we left, there would have been a lot of unanswered questions for us.”

Judy Hanna never thought her husband would give up football. They were high school sweethearts in Sudan and always had football in their lives. He played at University of New Mexico when they were married, and their children were raised on the sport.

“This is terrible, but a lot of coaches die on the sideline, and I thought Larry would be one of them,” Judy said.

Larry Hanna most misses affecting the students’ lives, he said.

He still attends Texas High School Coaches Association coaching school every summer, and he told Judy to keep his playbook when she cleaned off some shelves recently.

He listens to Monahans football games on the radio, but he hasn’t attended one since he left the program.

Hanna explained. Kind of.

He didn’t want to interfere that first year when Mickey Owens took over, he said. Plus, his son, Shad, became the head coach at Alpine, and he went to his games.

As far as a definite justification to why he avoided the Loboes on Friday night: “I don’t have an answer to that. … It was still difficult for me to take that step, even when I was campaigning.”

But he’ll be there this year, he said. Judy will attend, too.

“It’s in you,” she said, “you know, the Loboes.”