Hogan Hansen, enrolled at Michigan, brought Bellevue football back to prominence
Even with the rumors swirling, Hogan Hansen never doubted he’d made the correct decision. His purported next head football coach, Jim Harbaugh, was leaving the University of Michigan for a return to the NFL.
Then he wasn’t. Or was he?
“When we were in Houston, the NFL rumors had already started,” said Hansen, the former Bellevue tight end who already was in Ann Arbor enrolled at Michigan when the Wolverines played Washington for the National Championship.
It could have been an important moment. When college coaches leave a program, many times so do players. But Hansen, a member of this year’s Northwest Nuggets, didn’t waver.
“He graduated already and he early enrolled at Michigan,” said Lorenzo McKinney, the Bellevue assistant coach who mentored and molded Hansen’s innate talents and attributes over the last four seasons. “I can’t help but get chills when I talk about this young man.”
Hansen helped lead the Bellevue Wolverines back to the top of the state in 3A. Bellevue won two state titles with Hansen in the lineup, both as the highly-touted tight end he has become and a player who on defense ultimately won a state player of the year award.
“From the start, he had the passion,” McKinney said. “He wanted to be great.”
“I had a chance to leave (Bellevue), and go catch more balls at one of the local private schools,” Hansen said. “But the proof is in the pudding. We won state two of my three years.”
Hansen is a member of The Tacoma News Tribune’s 2024 class of Northwest Nuggets.
Hansen’s freshman season coincided with the Covid pandemic season when there was no state championship played. But even with the chance to transfer available in high school, Hansen mirrored what he did this January with Michigan.
He stayed without doubts.
So when Harbaugh did finally take the head coaching job with the Los Angeles Chargers just days after the Wolverines beat the Huskies for the national championship, there was no panic for the 6-foot-6, 240-pound tight end.
“I wouldn’t say there was ever a moment where it got to that,” Hansen said. “I committed to the program and the culture here at the end of the day.”
Taking the opportunity to graduate and leave Bellevue early did include a negative or two, of course. For one, he is currently missing his senior season of basketball at Bellevue in favor of weight-training workouts, study sessions with a new playbook and his first college classes.
“He cares about people,” Bellevue head coach Michael Kneip said. “That’s the really unique thing. He’ll block for guys 100 times in a row if that’s what we need him to do. It’s maybe not what he would have wanted, but he just wanted to win.”
The attention Hansen drew began from the moment he stepped on campus as a 6-3, 190-pound athlete. Barely before he’d started practicing, an assistant coach from Arizona saw him, and asked Kneip and McKinney about Hansen.
“We didn’t know,” McKinney said. “With Covid and everything, we’d not even really had contact with the kids. But his success came early and we were just trying to keep him grounded.”
Ultimately, they found ways.
“After his first official offer came from UW, I took him back to school and made him run hills,” McKinney said. “We talked to him, that it doesn’t matter what comes next.”
“The UW offer was just proof of that,” Hansen said. “I was so happy, of course. But the running, that reminded me this was just the start. This (the work) is the foundation and one offer is not everything.”
In the classroom, Hansen graduated early from Bellevue with a cumulative 3.8 grade point average. He was baptized as a Christian this year.
One year ago, Hansen was helping his Wolverines basketball teammates make a deep state run, interrupted only by a quarterfinal loss to top seeded Mount Spokane. In Hogan’s junior year on the hardwood, Bellevue ended on a two-game winning streak and beat Eastside Catholic on the final Saturday to take fourth place.
This season, he’s watching from afar a team that is again rolling into the 3A playoffs with momentum.
“I talk to all my guys all the time,” Hansen said. “That hurts me every day. It’s one of the negatives that I didn’t get to play basketball with my boys.”
Getting acclimated to college classes in Ann Arbor, Michigan, getting a head start on learning a very different offense from what he participated in at Bellevue, and getting stronger before the fall was the best decision he could make for himself, however.
He can count himself as the first Wolverine (Bellevue) football player to become an early college enrollee, and will have a head start on college courses before practice begins for his first Michigan Wolverine season.
“I’m already so much stronger than I was last fall,” Hansen said. “I’ll get an additional set of spring practices in. I’m a competitive person. I knew this was what would be the best for me and my future.”
He’ll play for new head coach Sherrone Moore, the man Harbaugh was quoted recently on X as “the right man for the job.” Moore was an assistant under Harbaugh and the main coach involved in Hansen’s recruiting.
“The transition has been pretty smooth,” McKinney said. “It’s nice the new head coach has been such a big part of Hogan’s recruitment.”
Moore was the assistant who stepped in for the three games that Harbaugh was forced to sit out this season while allegations of sign stealing swirled around the program, as well. He showed what he could do with the position.
“When Coach Moore went 3-0, it just showed he was the right person for the program,” Hansen said. “Everything that’s talked about here revolves around ‘the team, the team, the team.’ It’s just another reason I came to Michigan.”