Trojans junior Ryan Nix qualifies for state cross country meet with 15th-place finish at New Prairie regional, but team finishes sixth, falls one place short of qualifying

Tom Keegan
Onwardtrojans.com

Heading into this past weekend, excluding football players, Chesterton had 28 athletes eligible to compete in four different fall sports postseasons: tennis player Luke Sorgic, seven boys and seven girls cross country runners, plus 13 girls volleyball athletes.
Now there is one.
Ryan Nix ran well enough at the New Prairie cross country regional to run this coming Saturday at the LaVern Gibson Championship Cross Country Course in Terre Haute, site of the IHSAA state meet.
His teammates won’t compete with him. Only the top five teams and 15 fastest runners from non-qualifying schools advance to the state meet.
In order, Northridge, Penn, Crown Point, Goshen and Lowell took the first five spots. Chesterton placed sixth, 43 points behind Lowell. Points are calculated by adding the places of the first five runners (out of seven) from each school.
Nix finished 15th and ran a 16:08.3 to earn the sixth spot from the regional for the state meet among runners not on advancing teams.
For his teammates, who joined him in winning DAC and sectional championships, the season ended abruptly. Nix was the individual champion at both of those meets, memorably hunting down the favored Ben Perschon from Lake Central in the DAC meet at Kesling Park in LaPorte, and running alone out front in the sectional meet at Sunset Hill Farm.
Crown Point, runner-up at the DAC meet, was the only conference foe to finish ahead of Chesterton. Seniors Perschon (15:48.3) and Jake Metzger (15:59.4) of Crown Point and LC sophomore Lucca Neves (16:06.9) of LC were the only DAC runners to finish ahead of Nix at the regional.
Teammates are confident Nix will represent Chesterton well running the Lavern Gibson course.
“I know he’s going to do really well,” senior Ray Hundt said. “Ryan’s proven that the course doesn’t really matter a whole lot for him. It’s definitely one of the toughest courses that we run, but I have full confidence in him doing really well.”
Hundt went to state as an alternate his freshman season and worked so hard to recover from May surgery to repair torn labrums in both hips that he beat forecasts and was able to return to run without restrictions in the DAC meet, the sectional and the regional.
“Disappointed,” Hundt said of the team not qualifying. “There were probably a couple of things we could have done better, but I think we all ran as hard as we could and put it out there, so it’s just the way it happened.”
Nix expressed similar sentiments: “We didn’t really run bad, it’s just that all the other teams around us ran really, really well, and we weren’t able to compete against that. We didn’t have the outstanding races that some of the other teams had, like Lowell. I don’t think they ran that fast all year and we didn’t respond well to that.”
Nix’s classmate Spencer Martin ran a 16:49.3 to finish 31st.The Trojans’ three seniors were next to finish: Hundt (46th in 17:07.1), Will Roberson (53rd in 17:13.2) and William Morgan (61st in 17:22.1). Juniors Nick Jakel (17:22.4) and Nolan Harrington (17:23.7) ran with Morgan and were outkicked by him at the end.
Nix will not have teammates in the race with him Saturday, but he said he won’t be running alone in preparation for it.
“We support each other through the whole season,” Nix said. “I know they’ll support me this week at practice, too.”