Friday night was my first Electric City Showdown. For a lot of you it was the latest entry in a 55-year series you could recite from memory, but I’d have a hard time believing many of those nights came with more riding on them than this one. The stands were packed, dignitaries from across the city were on hand, and both teams had spent nine regular-season games working toward a night with a region title and a shot at the No. 1 overall seed on the line. Anderson was ready for this one long before kickoff, and as first impressions go, it lived up to every bit of the billing.
Westside won the toss and sent its high-powered offense out first. That first possession ended on a fourth-down stop instead, with Marcus Brownlee in on the tackle, and Hanna took over near midfield with a chance to grab the early lead. As it has all season, Hanna kept its offense on the field when it reached fourth down. Brock Cole picked up the fourth-and-3 and carried the Jackets to the Westside 22, but as the field shrank the drive stalled, and the 34-yard field goal try missed. The teams traded punts from there, and the scoreboard stayed blank a little while longer.
Then Westside needed exactly one throw. On the Rams’ third possession, Bear Woods hit Jae White on a quick hitch, and White turned a short completion into a 72-yard touchdown that put Westside up 7–0. White would find the end zone twice more before the night was over.
The second quarter turned into a field-position problem. Midway through the period, Woods, who had already done plenty of damage with his arm, dropped a pooch punt that rolled all the way to the Hanna 3. The Jackets did the hard part of digging out, working the ball up to their own 36, but the possession ended on a lost fumble, and four plays later Woods found Tajeh Watson-Martin for a 21-yard touchdown. That made it 14–0, and the game was starting to drift.
That is usually the point where a game against a team like Westside gets away from you, and nothing Hanna’s offense had done to that point suggested the slide was about to stop. So the return game stepped in again. Myles Norris took the ensuing kickoff 91 yards for a touchdown, and in about the time it takes to read this sentence, a two-score game was back to 14–7.
Westside answered the answer. The Rams went 65 yards in eight plays and finished with a 19-yard touchdown pass from Woods to White, and with just over a minute left before halftime, Hanna trailed 21–7. The first-half numbers for the offense were hard to look at. Hanna had no offensive points and 75 total yards, its only touchdown coming from the kickoff return team.
We have made it a point to quantify how well Hanna has played after halftime this season. Friday night was no different. And it started with the first possession of the second half. Hanna ran the football, with Demarcus Duck handling most of the carrying, accounting for 45 of the drive’s 60 yards, before finishing it himself on a 3-yard touchdown run. After 75 yards in an entire half, Hanna had gone 60 on one drive, and at 21–14, a single stop would put the ball back in its hands with a chance to tie before the fourth quarter.
The Rams would answer once more, and put together the kind of drive Hanna opponents have rarely managed this season, a patient 12-play, 69-yard march that ended with Woods and White connecting again, this time from 8 yards out. The play that kept it alive came on fourth-and-8, when Woods hit Watson-Martin to move the chains. It was Westside’s only fourth-down conversion of the night, and with the benefit of hindsight, I’d call it the second most important play of the game. At 28–14, the Rams had answered again.
From that point on, Westside did not score. The Hanna defense played the way it has played in second halves all season, and with a region title in reach it was somehow better than that. A Westside offense that put up 21 points in the first half managed seven in the second and none in the fourth quarter. Carson Cole led the team with 11 tackles and added two sacks, Zy West had 10 tackles, Greg Tatum had eight, and Connor Ash was credited with seven quarterback hurries against a passing game that was hard enough to slow down when it had all the time it wanted.
The offense, meanwhile, put together its longest drive of the night. Hanna went 70 yards in 17 plays, and Duck finished it with a 2-yard touchdown run with 6:51 left to make it 28–21. Seventeen plays is a long time to keep a big-play offense off the field, and when the Rams finally got the ball back, they worked their way to a fourth-and-1 with a little more than five minutes to play and tried to run for it. Chemar Joseph met the ballcarrier in the backfield. For the first time all night, Hanna had scored and Westside hadn’t answered.
Every piece was in place. The offense had found its footing, it still hadn’t failed on a fourth down, and it had the football with more than five minutes left and a touchdown to tie. Five plays and 41 yards later, Hanna faced second-and-7 at the Westside 15 with 2:50 to go. The next carry went up the middle for 5 yards, and as the runner was going to the ground, Westside knocked the ball loose and came up with it at its own 10. A play that would have set up third-and-2 at the 10 instead handed the Rams the ball with under three minutes left.
Hanna’s fight wasn’t finished. The defense forced a punt, and the offense got the ball back with 53 seconds left and 65 yards between it and a tie. A screen broke loose for more than 20 yards before a penalty brought it back, and the final drive netted 17 yards before the clock ran out. Westside took this chapter of the Showdown, 28–21.
There was a version of this game that got away early, and for a stretch of the second quarter it looked like the version we were going to get. What showed up instead was a team that went into the break down 14 with 75 yards of offense, then gained 201 more in the second half, won that half 14–7, finished 6 of 8 on third down and 2 for 2 on fourth, and kept an offense that had 21 by halftime off the scoreboard for the entire fourth quarter. By the end, a game that once felt like it was slipping away felt like one that had slipped through Hanna’s fingers. That is a harder kind of loss to sit with. It also can be the more encouraging kind. Friday was the last game of the regular season, not the last game for these Yellow Jackets, and if it showed the rest of the state anything, it’s that this team plays four quarters, which is exactly what Jacket fans expect.
Playoff Projections
While the game was going on Friday, we were keeping an eye on a few other scores around the state, and by halftime those games were breaking Hanna’s way for seeding purposes. That mattered even more than usual this year. Even with the loss, Hanna’s tough non-conference schedule paid off under the new RPI system now used in every classification.
The system works like this. Region champions and runners-up get automatic bids, and the rest of the field is filled by RPI, a formula built 40 percent on your own record, 30 percent on your opponents’ records and 30 percent on your opponents’ opponents’ records. Put those last two together and 60 percent of the number comes down to who you played, which is why a hard non-conference schedule stops being something to survive and starts being something that pays you back in November.
Seeding works in layers. Within each half of the bracket, the region champions are seeded first, in RPI order, and the runners-up come next. Because 4A has seven regions, the champions can’t split evenly between the two halves, and the swing region is the one that includes Lancaster and Lugoff-Elgin. A Lancaster title would have sent that champion to the Upper State. Lugoff-Elgin won it instead and became the fourth region champion in the Lower State, which left the Upper State with three. Gaffney earned the No. 1 seed, followed by Westside and South Pointe, and that put the No. 4 seed, along with the first-round bye that comes with it, in the hands of whichever runner-up had the best RPI.
That was Hanna, by 0.00625 RPI points. Indian Land took the No. 5 seed, Lancaster No. 6 and Greer No. 7, and the rest of the bracket was filled out by RPI. The Jackets sit out the first round and will host the winner of Indian Land and Greenwood on November 13.
From there, it’s all conjecture. I’m not a coach trying to keep a group of teenagers focused on the next opponent, so I have the luxury of looking ahead. If the higher seeds win in the second round, Hanna would travel to Gaffney for the third. Look one step past that and there’s a real possibility the Upper State Championship turns into an Electric City Showdown rematch, this time at Westside. I’m not pulling for any particular scenario, but you do have to wonder whether the higher powers of the football universe already have that one penciled in.
You can see the full 4A playoff bracket at https://hannafootball.com/articles/2026-4A-Playoffs.
Statistically Speaking
With the regular season finished, here is where the 2026 Jackets land among the 65 Hanna seasons on record, going back to 1962.
Start with the basics. Eight wins makes this the 23rd regular season in program history with eight or more, and 329 points makes it just the 15th to reach 300. Only 12 Hanna teams have done both in the same season, and this one made it six straight years obtaining that mark.
The 329 points rank 12th among those 65 seasons, and the +182 scoring differential ranks 11th. The differential is the more interesting number once you see where it came from. Hanna scored just seven fewer points than it did in 2025 but allowed 49 fewer, turning last year’s +140 into this year’s +182. That is a 42-point improvement.
That defense is also what puts this team in rare company. Only six Hanna teams have won at least eight regular-season games, scored 300 or more points and allowed 150 or fewer. The 1989, 2002, 2004, 2017 and 2018 teams got there first, and the 2026 team, which allowed 147, makes six. Since 2000, only two Hanna teams have held six or more opponents to 14 points or fewer, the 2017 team doing it eight times and this one doing it six. Not a single opponent reached 30 points against Hanna this season.
The offense had a stretch worth remembering too. Against Laurens, Greenwood and Easley, Hanna scored 164 points, the second-most in any three consecutive regular-season games in program history, and the +135 margin over those three games also ranks second.
Lastly, five of Hanna’s eight wins came by 20 points or more, the other three came by eight points or fewer, and not one landed in the 9-to-19 range in between. No other team in 65 seasons of Hanna football has put together at least five wins by 20 or more and three by eight or fewer in the same season. This team, apparently, does not do moderately comfortable.
Wrap-Up
The regular season is the part of the year when a loss can be absorbed. It goes on the record, it shapes the seeding, and the next Friday comes around anyway. That cushion is gone now. Everything this team did from the opener through Friday night, the lopsided wins and the close ones and a rivalry game that came down to its final drive, was the work of earning a place in the bracket, and Hanna earned a good one, with a week to reset and a home game waiting on the other side of it.
From here, every Friday means more than the one before it, because any one of them can be the last. Win or go home is an easy thing to say this time of year. The mindset behind it has to take hold well before the moment it actually applies, and this team gets an extra week to let it settle in. Somewhere down that road, if the bracket cooperates, Westside could be waiting. That is a long way off, and there is a lot of football to win before anybody gets to think about it, but my first Electric City Showdown doesn’t feel finished, and I have a feeling I’m not the only one.