Mitchell football coach Jim Hartman sat among the state’s football titans – Cherry Creek and Fairview at the time – and expressed his views on having a team of exclusively one-way players.

It came with a twist. He let his players decide their positions.

“They couldn’t believe it. They laughed at me,” said Hartman, who recalled the discussion at a football clinic in Denver in the early 1970s. “They said ‘You can’t give your kids a say in that.’ They couldn’t believe that I’d say something like that.”

-Vote for the 1975 Mitchell football team here-

Behind Hartman’s innovative philosophy was his belief that the players would improve faster with repetition at one position. It all came to fruition in 1975 when the Marauders won the first of three state championships with the school.

Who’s laughing now?

“The players felt more a part of the team and worked on their skill set 100 percent of the time,” said Hartman, whose squads in 1977 and 1981 also hoisted the state trophy. “They never had to go to the other side of the ball. The down side was, at the first of the year, we’d lose a game or two as the kids were getting better at repetition.”

That was the case in 1975. The Marauders fell, 7-6 to Arvada West on a failed 2-point conversion in the fourth quarter, then rolled the rest of the way and shut out John F. Kennedy, 9-0 in the title game.

“We won it that time (Mitchell lost in 1973 with blue-chip tailback Terry Miller), and that started a pretty good run,” Hartman said.

To get to the finals of The Gazette’s Reader’s Choice bracket for the greatest high school team the area has ever produced, the 1975 squad had an imposing opponent in the semifinals.

None other than Hartman’s 1981 Mitchell squad that went 14-0 and holds a spot in the Colorado Springs Sports Hall of Fame.

“I wondered how that would turn out, but I didn’t vote,” Hartman said. “I don’t like to pick between teams. I love them all.”