Chesterton freshman Ben Phillips coming off a career day at the regional and looking to go lower in the third leg of the 4x400 relay at state, then he plans to use his speed on the football field

Tom Keegan
Onwardtrojans.com

Becoming the fourth set of wheels on an accomplished 4x400 relay team as a freshman when the other three are seniors sounds a little intimidating, both athletically and socially.
Chesterton freshman Ben Phillips quickly learned that wasn’t the case for him. Seniors Nathan Vaughan, Cal Wisniewski and Louis Raffin realized their best shot at breaking a school record that had been neared many times and improving their seventh-place finish at the state meet last season involved Phillips growing up in a hurry. So the three seniors welcomed him, but didn’t baby him.
“Training with Nate, Cal and Raffin, I feel like they’ve pushed me to become a better athlete,” Phillips said after running two races at the regional meet in under 50 seconds, going 49.76 in the open 400 to go with a 49.3 split in the relay.
Phillips’ talent was evident right away to the seniors who had run with Ben’s brother, Aaron Resto, the previous couple of years. Resto is a freshman on the track team at Olivet Nazarene University.
“We have super high expectations for Ben, especially for a freshman, but it’s because we know he’s capable of running times like that,” Raffin said.
The seniors also pushed him recently in another way, Vaughan said, reinforcing what Coach Bryan Nallenweg convinced the freshman to do: Eat more on meet days.
“I’ve been having some horrible meets lately, so Coach said, ‘You’ve got to lock in, start eating more food and drinking.’ I did that today and executed my race,” Phillips said after the regional meet at Valparaiso. “Lately I haven’t been eating food and I’ve been in the low 50s. Today I ate some peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, some pasta. Coach has been reminding me to hydrate. I actually went to his room today to get two water bottles.”
He said that at 3 p.m. he downed a water and ate a sandwich and some crackers and “I was ready to go. I’ve got to keep eating more.”
Eating more on race day. Doesn’t that weigh down a sprinter? Not if it’s the right amount of the right food eaten at the right times. In that case it boosts a runner’s energy.
Freshmen don’t come in knowing everything and sometimes embrace misconceptions, not yet realizing that so many things in sports are counterintuitive. For example, the key to hammering drives on the golf course was summed up with the four words that the late two-time U.S. Open winner Julius Boros used for the title of his golf instruction book: “Swing Easy, Hit Hard.”
Another old misconception: Lifting weights is bad for shooters in basketball and makes runners’ muscles too tight. Ask Logan Pokorney and Tobias Ray about the former and Vaughan and Raffin about the latter.
“I haven’t been doing any lifting, actually,” Phillips said. “They say if you lift, it makes you slower, but I don’t think that’s true.”
Once he incorporates weight training into his routine for his final three years, the possibilities for how low he can go grow even more exciting. Chances are he will because he looks up to the three seniors on his relay and is aware that they all believe in the benefits of embracing Matt Wagner’s strength training and the proof is easy to spot by how much faster they run every year.
Phillips is so grateful to the seniors that after running his two sub-50 quarter miles at the regional, he said that if he received a callback to run the open 400 at state he was going to scratch from it in order to save all his energy for the relay.
“I’m actually going to drop the 400 to try to run a low 48 split, so I’m going to drop it just so we can get a better chance at winning it in the 4x4,” Phillips said. “I don’t want to be selfish to the seniors and run the 400. I have three more years and this is their last year, so why don’t I just drop it and run it for them?”
As it turned out, he didn’t get a callback, but it was a nice thought.
Phillips was obsessed all year with running a sub-50 open 400 and has accomplished that. Now that he ran a 49.3 split in the relay he already has developed a new target, as he revealed in his quote about trying to run a low 48 in the final relay Saturday. Yet, nobody would complain if he ran another 49.3.
“That was big,” Wisniewski said of Phillips’ day. “Those are crazy times for a freshman.”
After the state meet, Phillips plans to use that speed to try to earn a spot in the varsity football lineup, at minimum as a receiver.
“And Coach might be playing me at defensive back, too, so both ways this year,” he said.
Part of a school record in a relay as a freshman and a varsity football player as sophomore would make for an impressive start to his Chesterton career.
The Trojans ran a 3:17.86 at the Lafayette Jefferson Sprinters Showchase to break the school record on Arpil 17. Eight days later, the runners topped themselves with a 3:17.74.
They won the regional race in 3:18.51. They would need to break the school record for a third time to have any shot at winning the event. Franklin Central established itself as the favorite by popping a 3:13.54 at the Greenfield Central regional and Chesterton is seeded fifth.