HISTORY MAKERS

[PHOTOS COURTESY OF PETERBOROUGH TRANSCRIPT & MONADNOCK CENTER FOR HISTORY & CULTURE] Hardly anyone saw this one coming—the stunning, first-ever boys’ basketball state championship for Conval High in the 1985-’86 season. A young team with just two seniors—co-captains Chris Merrifield and Sean Crowley—the Cougars began the season stumbling at 1-4 and trying to find their bearings. The inauspicious beginning was marked by the first-ever loss by a Conval team at Kearsarge, and h

The first year in 1970 was a great one but a really weird one for Conval High’s soccer team. In those days, soccer in NH was just one league, and teams were placed in regions. It’s weird and hard to believe, but the first-year Cougars, who finished 10-2-2, were 9-1-2 heading into the last week of the regular season and yet a tournament spot wasn’t guaranteed. Conval was battling four other highly successful schools—Goffstown, Hinsdale, Wilton and Fall Mountain—for the regiona

From an April 1949 issue of the Peterborough Transcript. They thought 20 in a row was something special, but it was only the beginning for Hancock High. You forget that tiny, picturesque Hancock once had a high school (located on School Street, at the site of the Conval District grade school). You forget that in the 1940s and early 1950s, Hancock was one of the smallest and most competitive high schools in the state. In 1949, for example, there were 16 boys in the entire high