2025 Chesterton Athletics Hall of Fame: Cassie Peller, Class of 2004

Tom Keegan
Onwardtrojans.com

Few things rankle coaches quite as deeply as wasting time urging athletes to put forth maximum effort. As coaches see it, it’s the bare minimum, and any time spent on it is time that won’t be spent on learning another way to improve.
That never was an issue for Cassie Peller, a distance runner extraordinaire during and after her running career at Chesterton, from which she graduated in 2004.
Now living in New Hampshire with the married name Nelson, Cassie teaches at Franklin Pierce College’s physician’s assistant program, moving there after her husband, Mike Nelson, took the job as the Dartmouth College track and field and cross country director in August of 2024. They have three children, ages 13, 11 and 8.
If she only knew then what she knows now, which grows every day since it’s Mike’s job to stay up on the latest training methods, Cassie could have saved herself some pain.
“I always wanted to go all out in practice,” Peller said. “I needed to learn how to take some days easy, work hard the other days, but you don’t know that when you’re 14, 15. You just want to make your coach happy. Through my high school career, I got better at that.”
It was one of the best running careers, a Chesterton athlete has ever experienced. Then she went on to a stellar career at Marquette University, where she twice was Big East runner-up in the 1600 meters and won a conference championship in the 4x800 relay.
Peller still holds Chesterton’s record in the 1600 meters (4:55.92), set as a sophomore. Going just a fraction of a second slower (4:55.98), she placed fourth in state meet in the event as a senior. She was state runner-up in the 800 meters (2:13.26) on a day the winner set the state record. Cassie ran on a 4x800 relay team that placed first at the state meet and broke a state record in back-to-back seasons. She had a remarkable five top four finishes in individual events at state: a second and two fourths in the 800, a third and fourth in the 1600. She was a three-time DAC champion in the 800 and 1600.
At Marquette, she was two-time Big East runner-up in 1600 meters and first in the 4x800 relay at the conference meet.
Looking back on the career of one of his most successful running pupils, retired cross country and track coach Steve Kearney did not need to be prompted to talk about Peller’s tendency to overdo training in her early years. He led with it, sharing a story that starts with the end of the New Prairie Invitational race Peller’s sophomore year.
The girls all knew the routine. After the race, they would go back to the team camp, change out of their spikes and into their training shoes, take a swig of water, and then precisely 30 minutes after the race they had just run had started, then went on a a three-mile cooldown run.
“Cassie was totally spent: ‘Mr. Kearney, I don’t think if I can go three miles. Is it OK if I do extra tomorrow?’” was how Kearney loosely recalled the conversation going. He granted her permission to do so and since Sunday runs away from the team were supposed to be light jogs, didn’t see the need to say more.
Then, after a couple of substandard performances from the sophomore, Kearney discovered the source of the decline from one of Cassie’s teammates.
“A teammate of hers told me she had been running hill repeats at Sunset Hill on Sundays, the day after a race, which is a really, really bad idea, really bad idea to do six miles of intense hills the day after a meet,” Kearney said. “I had a talk with her and told her, ‘You are forbidden from running the next two Sundays.’”
Learning that in some ways that less is more is a lesson that doesn’t always come naturally to distance runners.
“My first two cross country seasons ended pretty poorly because I was out of gas by October, November,” Peller said. “I think by my junior year I started to figure out a little more of that hard-easy principle, being ready for November. I did a little better job with it in track. We didn’t run as much in track, so there was a little bit less of the burnout in track season.”
Following the hard-easy method, Peller improved at the state cross country meet from 38th as a sophomore to seventh as a junior, when the Trojans finished third as a team under new head coach Mike Rouse. She placed 10th at state as a senior.
For a high school distance runner, reflections often center on training rather than racing.
“The summer memories definitely stand out,” Peller said. “Coach Kearney had workouts all summer at different locations around the Indiana Dunes, so I think some of that summer cross country training stands out to me as so much fun because we could meet at the beach, meet at the train station trails, go for a run at 6 at night and get to see your friends every day.”
Ride and tide races usually involve running and then riding a horse. Rouse’s summer ride and tides substituted horses with bicycles.
“It was you, your partner and a bike. It was 10 miles, and you had to cover it any way you wanted to,” Peller said. “That was a lot of fun because each team had to strategize: All right, who’s the stronger runner? They should do more running and the other person bikes.”
It took place on the Duneland Bike Trail.
“So, say I’m partners with you. I start running and you start biking,” Peller explained. “Obviously, you’re going to get way ahead of me. You decide you bike a mile and then you drop the bike, and you start running. Then I’m coming up and I’m running and there’s the bike that we’re sharing. I pick it up and I start biking. So collectively, you had to cover the10 miles. Five miles out, five miles back. It was cool, a lot of fun.”
Peller, daughter of former Chesterton boys basketball coach Tom Peller, limited her basketball to the intramural level in high school.
“I thought about it briefly, but my younger sister said, ‘stay away.’ She wanted it to be her sport. I’m not very good. I shoot like a frog,” Cassie said. “I’m athletic enough that I would have helped on defense, but that’s about it, so I just let it be my brother (Tom) and my sister’s thing, and it is their thing. They both were phenomenal players, and my two older kids love basketball.”
Cassie’s younger sister, Kelly, helped to knock Cassie out of one of her spots in the Chesterton record book. Kelly joined Allyson Harvey, Alison Bishel and Sarah Kehe in giving the Trojans their third state title in the 4x800 relay in four seasons with a 9:03.77, a state record that wasn’t broken until 2013.
Cassie will be in town for Hall of Fame weekend to join fellow inductees and visit with old friends, including Chesterton girls cross country and track and field head coach Lindsay Moskalick.
“We run together when I come back home,” Cassie said.
Peller said she wasn’t surprised to see Moskalick, formerly Hattendorf, become such a successful coach.
“She’s a leader. Her personality,” Peller said. “She’s outgoing, loud in a good way, and just motivating. When I came in as a freshman, she was a junior and the expectation was you worked your butt off, and it mainly came from her.”
Flooring it in workouts came naturally to Peller, but it wasn’t until learning to ease off the gas pedal at times that she fully realized her potential in cross country to become one of Indiana’s top performers in that running discipline for two years to go with three in track.