2026 Chesterton Athletic Hall of Fame: Coach Steve Kearney, Class of 1966, honored for making his passion for distance running contagious while coaching generations of girls and boys cross country and track athletes on successful teams

2026 Chesterton Athletic Hall of Fame: Steve Kearney, Class of 1966, honored for a decades-long coaching career that helped runners attain state championships

Steve Kearney’s trademark smile and catch phrase “Stride On” tend to make his upbeat mood contagious.

Tom Keegan
Onwardtrojans.com
As a boy, it wasn’t that Steve Kearney was the sedentary type. Quite the contrary. He enjoyed the long hikes he went on as a Boy Scout and bombed around Chesterton on his bicycle. It’s just that he didn’t view himself as an athlete.
“In gym class, I wasn’t good at anything,” Kearney said, looking back on the day that put him on a path to discovering a lifetime passion that has brought him and the generations of Chesterton distance runners he coached so much joy. “It was my freshman year and my gym teacher pulled me aside and said I had the fastest mile time out of his classes and told me I should run cross country. I said, ‘What is that?’ So I started running as a sophomore.”
And he still hasn’t stopped.
Kearney is perhaps as associated with two words as any Chesterton graduate ever has been with any two words: “Stride On!” is how he ends many conversations with his beaming smile and upbeat nature. He practices what he preaches. He said he undoubtedly has run far more than 100,000 miles in his life and that doesn’t even count the strides he made at track and cross country meets, hustling to get into the position to encourage as many runners as possible, not just the most talented ones.
“I really emphasized coaching all 110 every year,” Kearney said. “It’s to talk about Katey Parsons or Cassie Peller or Lindsay Hattendorf, but I was usually out there on the course yelling for the last girl coming through the chute, too. They were contributing to the team, too. We had some great teams and quite often the No. 1 girl after finishing was out there yelling with me.”
Kearney said that when coaching with the late Larry James, a member of the first Chesterton Athletic Hall of Fame class, they encouraged the athletes “to remain active 365 days a year. We encouraged them to play other sports.”
Kearney, who turns 78 on Sept.12, will be honored at halftime of this coming Friday night’s football season-opener and inducted into the Hall of Fame at the following night’s banquet at Sand Creek Country Club..
Inducted into the Indiana Cross Country and Track Coaches Association Hall of Fame in 2015, Kearney compiled a stellar record coaching girls and boys in both sports and teaching math at his alma mater until retiring at the end of the 2014 school year.
To the best of his recollection, 1974 was the first year he coached track at the high school. That was as an assistant to Connie Hamilton on the girls team. He still has a large presence at home cross country meets, where he drives the lead gator so that the runners don’t lose their way, and serves as the public address man at track meets.
Kearney’s teams achieved great things at his alma mater.
His girls track teams finished in the top 10 in the state five years in a row (2002-06) and he coached three 4x800 relay teams that won state championships with three state records.
In five years as head coach of the boys and girls cross country teams, his teams amassed seven top 10 finishes, including a runner-up.
Kearney was no stranger to getting the most out of his talent well before he taught others to do the same.
He takes pride in sharing that he was Chesterton’s first 2-mile record holder (10:10) as a senior, the first year that the IHSAA added the event, but also is quick to point out that the next year sophomore Steve Wynder shattered his record “by about 50 seconds.”
Kearney (Ball State ’70) continued his running career in college.
“I never got a scholarship but became a contributing member of a really good team,” he said. “They told me the marathon was too short a race for me. The 5 and 10 K were too short for me in college.”
Making prophets out of the Ball State coaches, Kearney ran the road race of his life at a distance of 50 kilometers, which is almost five miles longer than a marathon.
The Road Runners Club of America designated the 50K hosted by the Toledo Roadrunners Club as its national championship race and Kearney won it in 1977 with a time of 3 hours, 21 minutes. Thirteen years later, he won The Athletic Congress 1990 50K Masters race with a 3:26.
Never one to miss an opportunity to promote the sport he loves, Kearney joined friend Hal Higdon and others in a run from Long Beach, Indiana, where Higdon resides and just turned 95, to Higdon’s hometown Owensborough, Kentucky in 1985.
Higdon, once the runner-up at the Boston Marathon, a training innovator, author and former editor of Runner’s World, came up with the idea and invited Kearney to join him.
“We rented a camper that we would sleep in and hired a kid who just graduated high school to drive it,” Kearney said. “We mapped it out in advance so we would be on back roads most of the time. As it turned out, it was the hottest week of the summer and we had three guys who gave up and went home. Three or four others ended up taking time off and the driver would pick them up, and I think three of us made it all the way.”
Speed wasn't required for that run, but early in his career Kearney was able to devlop of that than he would have ever thought possible.
Kearney called the 4:26 mile that he ran for Ball State, “maybe my best track race ever.”
“I was running that in Terre Haute and all the sudden, I was floating along and it was the last lap of my fastest mile ever and I didn’t feel like I was giving any effort at all,” he said. “I couldn’t make my legs or hands go any faster and I actually passed two guys on the straightaway.”
When such things that defy explanation happen with a runner, they often are attributed to endorphins, natural chemicals the brain releases to block pain and reduce stress.
“I would have to say that was my best example of endorphins,” Kearney said of the mood-boosting chemicals.
Happy is Kearney’s default position even without endorphins kicking in and few things make him happier, other than maybe hanging out with his grandchildren, than running into athletes he coached.
Soccer star Leslie Nelson, inducted into the Chesterton Athletic Hall of Fame a year ago, also performed well as a high jumper. Kearney believed running on one of Chesterton’s many 4x400 entries in dual meets was good training for all track and field athletes. He had a heck of a time trying to get Nelson to do it, which made him smile all the wider when watching the Chicago Marathon he saw her coming around the bend.
Then there was the time Kearney attended the Boston Marathon to watch his son run and knew that a former 100-meter hurdler of his when her name was Mary Frisch was running, so he looked up her bib number and got in position to see her pass by.
“I’m standing by the side of the road and Mary comes by and she’s got a shirt on that says, ‘Running for 2’ with an arrow pointing to her stomach. She was several months pregnant.”
Mary’s marathon passenger that day, Alaina Allbrecht, “is due to come to Chesterton in a year or two. I told her, ‘Alaina, I saw you running 12 years ago and you’re only 11.’ She knew what I meant. She had heard the story.”
High jumping and hurdling don’t typically project to running marathons.
Then again, you never know. It’s even possible for a freshman in high school who had come no closer to athletic achievements than hiking on trails with the Boy Scouts and cruising through town on a bicycle to go on to win a national race longer than a marathon and help generations of distance runners to smile through the miles.