Hall of Fame
A native of Hemingford, Neb., about 45 miles south of Chadron, Joe Planansky, is the first Chadron State athlete to enter the Rocky Mountain Athletic Conference's Hall of Fame. Not many football teams build their offenses around the tight end, but Chadron State College designed numerous plays in the early 1990s around theirs. That's because Joe Planansky was what Coach Brad Smith called, "probably the best blocker I ever coached."
Not only could he block but Joe could catch the ball with the grace and ability of a wide receiver. By the time he concluded his career in 1994, he had caught 154 passes for 1,877 yards and 11 touchdowns. His number of receptions was a school record when he graduated and still ranks third on the Eagles' all-time list.
Planansky was a four-year starter, a three-time unanimous all-conference selection and was chosen by his teammates as the Eagles' most valuable player as both a junior and a senior.
Planansky was placed on the C.M. Frank Small University second-team All-American team as a junior and moved up to the first-team his senior year. Frank, an amateur artist and history professor drew a caricature of Planansky that was on the cover of the program that announced his All-American team.
The name Planansky has been around Chadron State a long time. His great uncle, Wilmer Planansky, earned 10 letters in three sports at CSC in the late 1930s. Wilmer was a charter inductee into the Chadron State Athletic Hall of Fame in 1983.
Altogether, nearly two dozen of his family members have attended CSC. Wilmer's sister, Joan, was the CSC Homecoming queen in 1950 and Joe's father, Ed. played football for the Eagles in the late1960s.
Ed was his son's football and wrestling coach at Hemingford High School. Joe was one of the premier football players in the state and was selected to play in the Nebraska Shrine Bowl the summer after he graduated.
Joe also was a sensational wrestler, perhaps the best in the state his senior year, when he was undefeated and won the Class C championship at 189 pounds.
Joe initially enrolled at Kansas State, where he planned to study engineering and play football. After a year in Manhattan he decided engineering wasn't his forte and transferred to Chadron State.
Planansky caught 21 passes as freshman while sharing playing time with a senior, then grabbed 45, 44 and 44 the next three years. He averaged 12.2 yards per catch during his career.
He also did well in the classroom, graduating with a 3.38 GPA while majoring in math and chemistry. After concluding his eligibility, Planansky became the first Chadron State gridder to play in the Snow Bowl all-star game in Fargo, N.D. During his senior year, most NFL teams sent scouts to Chadron to check him out. He was invited to the NFL Combine in Indianapolis and signed a contract that spring with the Miami Dolphins.
Planansky spent most of the 1995 season on the Dolphins' developmental squad. Near the end of the '95 season, Planansky was activated for two games. Planansky’s NFL career ended in the fall of 1996 when he asked for his release.
In the fall of 1996 Joe was a student assistant coach with the Chadron State football team then enrolled in graduate school at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln for one semester. The following year, he taught math and coached the wrestling team at Gering High School in Gering, Nebraska.
While in Lincoln the spring of 1997, Joe met his future wife, Kim Koelling, a volleyball standout at Nebraska Wesleyan University. They were married in the summer of 1998 and moved to Mankato, Minn., where both were graduate students, teaching assistants and assistant coaches for two years at Minnesota State-Mankato. In the fall of 2000, he enrolled in Parker College of Chiropractic in Dallas