2026 Chesterton Athletics Hall of Fame: Rich Raffin, Class of 1979, look up in the sky, it’s a bird, it’s a plane, no, it’s a Trojan!

Tom Keegan
Onwardtrojans.com

Chesterton teachers and coaches, former and current, can attest to the parenting skills of Rich and Cecile Raffin, based on the positive, others-first attitudes of their 13 children in classrooms and athletic fields of competition.
But not everyone has been around long enough to know first-hand what sort of athlete Rich, a Class of 1979 member of the Chesterton Athletics Hall of Fame that will be honored at halftime of Friday night’s football game vs. Hobart and again at a banquet Saturday at Sand Creek Country Club.
So, Rick Fulton, a former football teammate at Chesterton and for a year at Northwestern University and a fellow honoree this weekend, offered insight.
“He’s Clark Kent,” said Fulton, a 1980 graduate. “If anybody is Clark Kent, it’s him. Unbelievable. He runs like a deer. I mean, he was a hell of an athlete. You put the helmet on and play ball and he turns into Superman. Off the field, nicest guy in the world. Always laughing, smiling, just a good guy, but put a uniform on him and good luck!”
Then Fulton laughed at a memory: “You could be in the middle of a pile after a tackle and you could make him start laughing. Rich has been Rich ever since I’ve known him. He’s just that guy.”
For a guy who enjoys laughing, Raffin knew how to send supporters of Chesterton opponents home crying.
The outrageous football numbers Raffin produced in his senior season scream loudly of dominance and versatility, speed and stamina.
He averaged 29 yards per kickoff return and took one back 98 yards for a touchdown. He averaged 19 yards per punt return and 21 yards per reception and was the team’s second-leading tackler from his defensive end position. Raffin led the DAC in scoring and had four touchdowns in the first half of a win over defending state champion Portage. In another game, he returned two kicks for a TD.
His numbers came at a time when the DAC was the hottest football conference in the state. His sophomore year, Valparaiso won the state title, then Portage, then Merrillville.
The Chesterton MVP and DAC Offensive MVP in 1978, Raffin was named the Mental Attitude Award winner at the North-South All-Star Game.
Raffin took Chesterton football coach Mike Jennings’ suggestion to run track for the first time in high school as a senior to get even faster in preparation for college football.
Raffin knew so little about the sport that he didn’t find out until midway through a bus ride to Purdue for his first indoor track meet that he was supposed to wear spikes for the race.
“I didn’t know any better,” Raffin said. “So a runner from another team lent me his.”
He found the new world of track and field fascinating.
“I never realized how neat track meets were until I first ran,” Raffin said. “All the different events. It was so cool. And all the (team) tents and stuff. I thought it was like a carnival.”
And, oh, by the way, in his one and only track season, Rich tied the school record in the 100-yard dash with a 10.0.
“Coach Jennings was right,” Raffin said. “It did help.”
It helped the track team, too.
A prayerful man guided by his strong Catholic faith, Rich doesn’t shy from spreading the word.
For example, he shared what he believes was behind his four touchdowns in the first half vs. Portage, which allowed him to lead the conference in scoring and earn him Offensive MVP honors.
“I think Our Lord did that for me,” he said of the four touchdowns. “It made me the DAC Offensive MVP and without that, I don’t think Northwestern would have recruited me and I wouldn’t have met my wife.”
At Northwestern, as a freshman safety, he worked his way up the depth chart to gain playing time and then suffered a knee injury. He recovered in time for spring ball, wasn’t getting many snaps at safety and asked the assistant coach who recruited him if there was another position he could try. He suggested tight end.
“But I was not real big,” he said.
Then in the spring before his junior year, after Dennis Green replaced Rick Venturi as head coach, Raffin was switched to linebacker.
“I was getting the hell beat out of me because I had never played linebacker,” he said. “I remember coming home for a wedding and my arms were swollen.”
He learned the position quickly and toward the end of spring ball, “some of the older players said you’re starting to catch on.”
His response: “Yeah, if I didn’t, I’d be dead.”
He played the position so well that he earned team MVP honors as a junior, when he led the 0-11 Wildcats in tackles.
Despite that, in Raffin’s senior year a younger player was moved ahead of him.
Confident that he could help the team if put back in there, Raffin studied film of himself to see what he could do better. He said he noticed that he wasn’t playing relaxed and that all the tension kept him from moving as well as he knew he could.
“It’s important to enjoy it,” he said he learned. “Work hard, but enjoy it.”
After that player went down with an injury, Raffin returned to the lineup and helped his school break its NCAA Division I FBS record 34-game losing streak with a 31-6 win over Northern Illinois. Two weeks later, Raffin returned an interception for a touchdown and led the team in tackles in a 31-21 upset win over Minnesota, the second triumph in three weeks, this one ending a 38-game Big Ten losing streak.
Despite him obviously giving the defense a boost, Raffin was told by his position coach that he would be replaced as soon as the player ahead of him recovered from injury.
The next week, with extended family in the stands at Purdue, Raffin suffered a knee injury on the fifth play of the game.
“My career was done,” he said.
Looking back on that, Raffin demonstrated his knack for peeling back enough layers of a seemingly negative situation to turn it into a positive. He recalled a game that season in which he had to ask another player to make the defensive calls because his vision was blurred. Looking back, he thinks it was a concussion that he played through. If he had not suffered the knee injury and continued to play he wonders today how many concussions he might have suffered and how his mind might work today.
Getting back in the lineup and having the chance to play big parts in the two historic victories washed away the bad taste from his benching that otherwise might have lingered.
Raffin earned an engineering degree and was lured back by Green a few years later as a graduate assistant and used the opportunity to earn a Masters in Business Administration, both degrees applicable to his work as Director of Business and Development at Raffin Construction, located in the Far South Side of Chicago.
Mention the name Raffin in the presence of anyone even remotely involved with Chesterton High School’s athletics or academics and it usually leads to a comment similar to, “They (Rich and Cecile, as well as the children of Rich’s 11 siblings) need to write a book on how to raise great kids.”
To appreciate the roots of that requires going way back in time, all the way to 1969 when Rich’s parents moved from Chicago to the Jackson Township section of Chesterton, where Rich’s father built the family home and the nearest neighbors lived a mile away.
It meant an adjustment for the children who were accustomed to having friends on their block in Chicago. And there weren’t as many Little League opportunities.
They adjusted quite well.
“It was a great place to grow up. We were fortunate the families we grew up with were such solid families,” he said. “Part of it was that a lot of them were farmers. You would go to school and the kids who grew up in farm families had already been up working for two or three hours. So they were very solid workers, but they also came from families that were good moral people with strong faith. Part of farming is having faith that God will take care of you and your crops given all that crazy stuff that can happen.”
The next generation benefitted from seven of the 12 Raffins staying in the area. Cousins tend to have similar values, which builds a nice coat of armor in terms of protecting children from feeling pressure to change themselves and dumb down their standards to try to fit in.
The cousins appear comfortable in their own skin, a sign of confidence, which helps in athletics, the classroom and socially.
One good example of that: The vast majority of high school students carry smart phones, which can be gateways to unhealthy content for teenage brains to absorb. Not the offspring of the 12 Raffins who grew up in Jackson Township. They have flip phones. Rather than be embarrassed about it, Class of 2026 cousins and football and track teammates Patrick Mochen and Louis Raffin seemed to enjoy the retro-cool vibe that comes with flipping open a phone in front of classmates, not unlike how a student might feel stepping out of a Model T in the high school parking lot.
Through the years, Rich and Cecile have been asked many times: “How do you do it?”
Rich’s answer reveals the genuine positive lens through which he views the world: “A big family makes it easier in some ways when you're trying to instill certain things in your kids, which all families need to do. Sharing and treating people well, working with people, they have to do that with their siblings. So they take care of the younger ones. They share rooms together. They have to deal with each other.”
He considers himself fortunate for having been blessed with 13 children.
“When you see people who don’t have a bunch of children, but they raise their kids to have good virtue, it takes even more to do that,” Raffin said “When you see parents who can do that, it’s very powerful.”
He explained how else they were able to raise 13 children: “Our Lord takes care of us. But also, we would have families who didn't have a lot of kids who would help us. Like, ‘Hey, do you need your kid driven to this?’ It’s neat. You know, the friendships you have and how people help each other and stuff, it was really impressive. There are a lot of good people.”
Stephen, the last of Rich of Cecile’s children, is a sophomore hurdler on the track team. After he graduates there will be a year gap until Rich and Cecile’s oldest child, Rich, will send his oldest child to Chesterton, no doubt to the delight of teachers and coaches at the high school.
Some who work in education don’t see the value of sports and view the athletic department as the toy department without having the first clue, or even caring, how many hours the directors, coaches, athletic trainers and support staff put into their jobs for the benefit of students.
This educated man who works in construction and is about to go into the Chesterton Athletics Hall of Fame doesn’t view it that way.
“That’s one thing about sports: it teaches things in life for kids. It’s good in that sense. Hard work, working with other people, teamwork, overcoming times when things aren’t going well. Even if the kids have a bad game, I’d say to them just think about what happened, how you could improve. Don’t let it bring you down, and work hard in practice and the next game. Sports, if handled right, can be very helpful for kids.”
Confident yet humble athletes abound in the extended Raffin family. Louis Raffin, a key cog in the 4x100 and 4x400 relays that finished second at state last spring with him anchoring the latter race in a blazing 47.5 seconds, brings those traits to the Hillsdale College football team as a freshman.
“The other thing I’ll talk about is even if you’re a really good athlete, that doesn’t make you a better person than other people,” Rich said. “You need to realize teamwork is important. You were given these skills, but also you have team members who helped, so don’t make it all about you.”