Ray Hundt’s four-year journey at Chesterton amounts to a splendid blueprint for how to get the most out of the high school experience

Tom Keegan
Onwardtrojans.com

Ray Hundt’s introduction to high school sports came at Dogwood Park, where he learned at the end of the summer of 2022 that he had been cut from the JV soccer team.
Decision time: Withdraw and plot a four-year path that didn’t include athletics or pivot to another sport.
Hundt pivoted to cross country and that is why his farewell to high school sports went so much better than his introduction.
Overshadowed by all the bling the sprinters took home from the state track and field meet, Hundt ran and had the time of his life at the state meet at North Central High in Indianapolis last month.
For most of his running career, the longer the race, the better Hundt performed. Yet, that began to change during his steadily improving senior track season and concluded with Hundt running a lifetime best 2:00.79 in the second leg of a 4x800 relay he ran with Zarek Sierazy, Will Roberson and Spencer Martin.
It turns out Hundt had more speed than anyone had any reason to expect heading into the season. Considering all he had been through in the way of rehabilitating from injury, his feat was one of the more remarkable ones posted by a Chesterton athlete during a school year packed with so many.
The closest Hundt came to competing in the track postseason his junior year came watching from his seat in a wheelchair, bound there by a pair of surgeries to repair a torn labrum in each hip.
Armed with no guarantees that the arduous rehabilitation program, even without setbacks, would result in him having time to compete well as a senior, Hundt put his faith in the hands of the experts and religiously followed instructions.
He was rewarded by having the best cross country and track seasons of his career, surpassing expectations in both, quite an achievement considering that on the first day of the school year he took great pride in being able to jog one lap around the 400-meter track.
“It was very nice to see all the hard work that I had put in with recovery and physical therapy and everything kind of paying off at the end,” Hundt said of his swan song.
He followed the medical professionals’ plan to to get back to health and let distance coach Tom Moeller plan the workouts that resulted in Hundt peaking for the postseason.
“Fitting end to Ray’s high school career,” Moeller said. “Just goes to show what hard work and perseverance can do for a kid. He hopes to run in college so that was a nice springboard for him.”
Hundt began experiencing pain as a sophomore, initially thinking it was a groin injury dogging him. He did extra stretching and forged through the pain.
“Then junior year cross country it was really bad,” Hundt said. “I was not able to complete workouts fully, not able to participate in the runs to my capacity. My times started to suffer quite a bit, so by then that winter I started to take it more seriously with how much it was still affecting me.”
Chesterton’s athletic training staff referred him to doctors and physical therapists. Hundt said the extra stretching before races helped but “it wasn’t really creating the lasting comfort. I was still having trouble throughout the week.”
Hundt said that Dr. Shane Nho of Midwest Orthopaedics at Rush ordered an MRI, diagnosed a labral tear in each hip and “it was pretty clear at that point that I would just have to get surgery. It was the kind of thing that wasn’t going to heal on its own.”
After coming to that realization, Hundt tried to finish the track season, posted some personal bests but had to shut it down midway through. He said he underwent one hip surgery May 6 or 7 of 2025 and the other six days later.
In a wheelchair for two weeks after surgery, Hundt said he was able to walk without the aid of any devices by the end of June.
The next milestone was jogging that lap around the track on the first day of his senior year.
“It felt pretty good,” he said. “It was a little painful, just getting back into it, but I was ecstatic I was able to do it.”
Hundt used sessions on the elliptical machine and other cross training methods to close the gap caused by limitations on how much pounding he could take running. He missed the season’s first two meets and in the third was able to follow a scripted path of running parts of the race and walking parts. From after the midseason New Prairie Invitational, Hundt was able to run the entire 5K races. His steady improvement culminated with an eye-opening fourth-place finish, second on the team, at the sectional championship won by teammate Ryan Nix on a day Chesterton won the team championship at Sunset Hill Farm.
“During cross country season I progressed pretty rapidly, I would say, because I went from not being able to run a full race to fourth at sectionals,” Hundt said.
Hundt’s pivot from soccer went so well, despite the interruption from surgeries, that he intends to continue competing in college. He will attend Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, an NAIA school in Prescott, Arizona.
“They’re a very distance-focused school, so they don’t really have a sprint program, nothing really shorter than the 3,000 steeplechase,” Hundt said. “So I’m looking forward to extending myself in the 10,000 and the 5,000 and maybe even trying my hand at the steeplechase.”
Embry-Riddle is a popular destination for future pilots, but that’s not what drew Hundt to the school: “They are pretty well known for their piloting program, but my hope is to be an aerospace engineer. I haven't decided whether I want to go into aeronautical or astronautical, aeronautical being airplanes and astronautical being rocket ships. Building and designing those is my goal.”
In layman’s terms, he is interested in becoming a rocket scientist.
A high school experience during which he poured so much into it and go so much out of it prepared Hundt for his ambitious next steps in life.
In addition to juggling schoolwork, running and rehabilitation from injuries, Hundt completed the requirements to become an Eagle Scout, was active in robotics, the pep band, Physics Club, Red Cross Club, Natural Helpers, Gold Standard Club and other student activities.
For his Eagle Scout project, Hundt designed a 3K cross country course on the Chesterton campus, which was going to be used for middle school races. The construction of the new soccer stadium prevented the full course from being finished, but the project remains a net positive for the community.
“The soccer stadium kind of went right through the middle of the course, so the course as a whole idea was kind of scrapped, but the staircase up that hill was completed and serves the purpose to help retain the shape of that hill so that there is less erosion,” Hundt explained. “Anybody who lives in the neighborhood can use it to go on walks or get to school. While we were building it there were quite a few people who came by, probably just to see what the noise was, but once we told them that we were building the staircase a lot of them were very grateful because they liked to go on walk through that trail there and that hill was pretty steep and would wash out and there were a lot of roots, so this was going to be a lot of help for them.”
When the door to the original plan closed, Hundt pivoted, much as he did when he didn’t make the cut in soccer.
“It was very nice that what started out as kind of a cross country-centered project was kind of turned into something that benefited a lot more people than just us,” Hundt said.
Similarly, the boy who was cut from the soccer team benefitted far more than himself by participating in cross country, track and countless other school activities for Chesterton.