Somewhere inside Hannah Edgar's computer sits every Vandalia varsity football game since 1950: every opponent, every score, records that stood for decades, and the names of the kids who eventually broke them. "A big chunk of my brain lives inside of a spreadsheet," she said. Numbers matter to Hannah. So does remembering.

Hannah graduated from Vandalia in 2008, but her work preserving Vandal athletic history started well before that. Her older brother, Father Zach Edgar, now a Catholic priest for the Springfield diocese, had been keeping football and basketball statistics himself, and once spent hours combing library microfilm with a former newspaper employee to help assemble a 50th-anniversary wrestling program book. Hannah remembers spending what may have been her only snow day of senior year in the school office, making copies for it. She started helping with basketball stats around 2005 and football the following year, gradually taking over more as Zach headed off to college and eventually seminary. Somebody had to keep going. Nearly two decades later, Hannah still is.

The timing of all this carries more weight than it might first appear. Hannah's father, Kim, a cost accountant at a local factory, died in January 2024. Her mother, Paula, has spent her career in bookkeeping and accounting and is still working today. Numbers, in other words, are the family language, and Hannah and Zach share something else that fits neatly alongside it: a serious interest in genealogy, tracing their own family's history the same careful way Hannah tracks a football season.

On football nights, Hannah works the sideline, tracking every play, sometimes crouched behind a lineman just to confirm the ball's exact position, feeding numbers to longtime radio announcer Todd Stapleton for his summaries. Coach Clay, now the school's principal, pairs her statistics with game film to understand exactly what happened on the field. During boys' basketball games, she somehow manages both statistics and public announcing at once, tracking a fast break with one hand while calling the play with the other. That combination is more surprising than it sounds. As a kid, Hannah avoided performing in front of people entirely, skipping an elementary honor chorus run by music teacher Mrs. Osborne specifically because she didn't want to be on a stage. She still gets nervous behind the microphone today. But basketball feels different to her, mostly because she knows the crowd's attention belongs to "the kids on the floor," not to her. What she asks of herself instead is precision. "I like to make sure that everything is as accurate and presented as accurately as possible," she said.

Hannah earned an accounting degree from SIU Edwardsville in 2012 and now works for Illinois Farm Business Farm Management, one of only seven people statewide in her specific role, personally processing income for roughly 15 offices across the state every spring. It's the same instinct that drives everything else she does: keep the numbers straight, keep them accurate, keep them somewhere reliable.

But her real contribution to Vandalia runs deeper than statistics. A school doesn't become an institution just because the building has stood a long time. It becomes one because people remember what happened inside it, who played, who coached, who broke the record, who came before. Hannah helps the town remember, and she also shapes what a given night actually feels like in the moment, through music. The holiday basketball tournament used to run on a handful of burned CDs; Hannah gradually expanded it into mixed CDs and eventually an iPod she still uses today. Some songs became fixtures almost by accident. Glen Campbell's "Rhinestone Cowboy," picked up years ago from a coach's old "Suddenly 70s" discs, somehow became a holiday-tournament staple. "It doesn't make a whole lot of sense," Hannah admits. It doesn't have to. The school band has played "Crazy Train" at basketball games since before Hannah was even a student, and when the band isn't there, Hannah makes sure the song plays anyway. Football gets its own staple in "Mr. Brightside," and "Sweet Caroline" makes regular appearances too- safe, crowd-pleasing, no explicit lyrics to worry about. She and Zach spend the whole year building a running list of songs worth adding, texting each other whenever something catches their ear on the radio, timing everything out against exactly how long an introduction or a halftime actually runs.

Hannah's own path into the tournament's stats rotation traces back to Brian Kern, now the junior high principal, who was head coach back when Hannah was still in high school, hanging around during the holidays. When older coaches wanted a break to visit grandkids at Christmas, Hannah got her foot in the door, and never really left. The soundtrack changes. The players change. Records eventually fall to somebody new. And certain things stay recognizable across all of it. Hannah found that out firsthand once, helping set up for a friend's wedding near the statehouse. A boy she didn't know turned around mid-conversation and said simply, "I know your voice." He'd recognized her from basketball games. Hannah wasn't entirely sure how to take it, since she genuinely prefers staying in the background. But that kid had picked out something familiar from his own life at Vandalia games, a voice from the gym that meant something to him without his even knowing her name.

That's what Hannah has become in this community: not the person taking the shot, not the name that ends up in the record book, but the person making sure the record book exists at all. Her parents are Vandalia graduates. So is Zach. So is she. Her father played football here; Hannah played softball and then volunteer-coached the sport for roughly nine years after graduating, watching the younger siblings of her own former classmates, and the kids of faculty she'd known since they were small, come up through the same program. The names keep changing. Hannah keeps writing them down, one season, one score, one song at a time, even as a new shot clock rule arrives next season to complicate her job all over again. Schools need people who understand that tonight's game will eventually become somebody's story from long ago. The spreadsheet records what happened. The music helps everyone remember how it felt. And somewhere in the bleachers, another kid may already know the voice.

Hannah Edgar will probably always be happier behind the scenes: keeping the stats, choosing the song, keeping the history, keeping the things worth keeping.