Nathan Vaughan comes home with four medals from state meet, Chesterton relay runners break their own school records by a lot in 4x100 and 4x400 to finish second in both events and Trojans place fifth as a team

Tom Keegan
Onwardtrojans.com

The most decorated boys track and field athlete in the history of Chesterton High School, Nathan Vaughan gave himself an extremely difficult bar to clear when he broke three school records in one night on April 14 at Valparaiso.
Yet, Vaughan managed to top himself at the best possible time 53 nights later, bookending his phenomenal senior season by becoming the first athlete in program history to come home from the state meet with four medals hanging from his neck. Better still, this time he was able to share two of the events with four different relay mates who teamed to significantly lower the times of the school records they had already broken this season.
The 4x100 relay run by junior Weston Moore and seniors Louis Raffin, Cal Wisniewski and Vaughan finished with the second-fastest time in state history, 40.65, edged in the race by Brownsburg, which ran a 40.60, a full-tenth of a second faster than the state record coming into the night that the school’s 2023 relay team posted.
Chesterton’s 4x400 relay runners, Vaughn, Wisniewski, freshman Ben Phillips and Raffin also took second place, running a 3:15.76, breaking the school record in the event for the third time this season. Raffin took the baton behind by a good margin and ran out of his mind, falling just 0.27 seconds short of catching the Bishop Chatard anchor man.
Vaughan had a part in every point Chesterton scored to help the Trojans to finish fifth at the meet held at North Central High School in Indianapolis on Saturday. Vaughan placed fifth in the long jump with a leap of 23-9.75 and took fifth in the 300 hurdles, clocked in 38.09.
The Trojans achieved all that in a meet that started at 4 p.m. ET with the long jump and concluded at 11:05 p.m with the 4x400. It was suspended twice, first because of a forecast for lightning in the area. The first and longer of the delays happened when Vaughn had one of his six long jump attempts remaining. He was in third before two competitors passed him on their final jumps.
The second delay came after lightning struck nearby as the 1600-meter runners were at the starting line, ready to go.
Proving what an entertaining meet it was, the spectators who were ordered to go to their cars during the delays and were told to listen for announcements from there returned in such high numbers that the stands looked just as packed.
On a night the Chesterton runners did everything right, they even found a way to turn the delays in their favor as they hung out on the special purpose vehicle with a giant Trojan on the side.
"It definitely throws some guys off,” Vaughan said of the delays. “Some people were probably pretty upset about it and frustrated, but we tried to stay positive and just be like it is what it is. We were kind of just hanging out, having a good time, tried to keep the morale high.”
Tried and succeeded.
The 4x1 was the second event after the second delay and Moore made the Trojans contenders when he blasted out of the blocks.
“I think that’s the fastest I’ve ever seen him run,” Wisniewski said of Moore. “When you see him catching someone on the first turn of a full track stagger, that’s crazy. He was gaining on those outside kids right away. He’s going to be special next year.”
Moore confirmed Wisniewski’s suspicion, saying it was “by far” his fastest run.
“I was flying off that start block,” Moore said. “It was amazing. I made up the stagger really fast.”
Moore credited workouts planned by head track coach Bryan Nallenweg for him running what he said was the best turn of his life.
“We’ve been working a lot on starts and on that type of turn, too,” Moore said. “We went into lane 8 on our track and tried to mimic how that track would look like. I’ve been working really hard on getting those blocks perfected and consistent.”
The 40.65 stunned Moore.
“It never occurred to me at all that we'd ever get that close to even breaking a state record today,” he said. “It's a blessing.”
Raffin said of Moore’s start that he is “used to it at this point. He’s always getting out, giving us big leads, setting the tone and we can always count on him for that.”
Raffin also called the 40.65 “ unbelievable. I don’t think I could process what we had just done. I was just shocked when I saw that time. I couldn’t even be mad about getting second with that time. What can you do at that point?”
Obviously, Chesterton’s handoffs were all smooth. You don’t run a 40.65 by cheating yourself with so-so exchanges.
“I don’t even know what happened,” Vaughan said of the outrageously low time. “Something clicked, but I couldn’t even tell you what it was. I don’t know if it was the competition or the atmosphere, but everything was perfect. I mean it literally was as perfect as it could have been.”
Vaughan was so stunned by his team’s performance, particularly in the shorter relay, that he wasn’t quite sure where to rank the day when stacked against every other day of his life.
“I don’t know, top five, top three maybe? I’ve had some really good fishing trips,” he said, some of those being of the ice fishing variety.
Not surprisingly, Vaughan said the 4x100 was the most gratifying of the medals dangling from his neck.
He answered “absolutely not” when asked if he thought the Trojans were capable of a 40.65.
“We have the second-fastest time in state history,” Vaughan said. “If Brownsburg’s not here we have the fastest time in state history. I’ll take that any day. You can't even be mad about something like that happening. And my long jump would have won it the last nine years and I got fifth. We call that getting Barnewalled. Kieran’s time (in the 110-meter high hurdles) last year was good enough to win 39 of 40 years and he got fifth. We got Barnewalled in two events today.”
Kieran Barnewall’s standout freshman season recently ended in the NCAA East regional, running for Indiana State, a Division I school that reached out to Vaughan again Saturday to see if he would be interested in changing his mind and committing instead of going to University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh.
Would he?
“No,” he said. “I’m going (to Oshkosh).”
Vaughn’s name is next to five Chesterton outdoor track and field school records: 100 meters (10.55), long jump (24-2), 300 hurdles (37.91), plus the two relays from Saturday night.
Raffin said he felt like he was “tightening up,” at the end of his 4x100 leg and was “just happy to get the baton off. I mean I was fast, but it didn’t feel like the fastest of my life or anything crazy.”
He made no such claim about his anchor leg of the 4x400. After the race, the public address man called attention to Raffin’s official split time of 47.53, easily the fastest of his life in his final act of an outstanding athletic and academic career at Chesterton.
“Yes, I knew that was the fastest I’ve ever been,” Raffin said. “I feel like you never know what you have in you until you’re trying to chase someone down and then it just happens. You hit a gear that you don’t know you could have and then it all comes out. We’ve run alone all year, except for the indoor (Hoosier State Relays).”
Wisniewski said of his classmate, “He's a Raffin at the end of the day. They've been doing it forever. He's crazy. I didn't even know he had that in him, but actually, yes, I did. That's a lie. I knew he was that fast, but he just needed the right competition to unlock it, I guess. He was unbelievable. I thought he was going to pass out after that.”
All four runners ran splits well under 50 seconds, including the fleet freshman.
“I was coming down the back stretch, losing some ground, but I was thinking this is the last time I’m running with them, I’m going to have to give it everything I’ve got,” Phillips said. “Then when Louis got the baton, I was looking at him on the back stretch and he’s closing the gap and I was thinking this is going to come down to the wire, and it did.”
Phillips made a big impression on the track stars three years ahead of him in school.
“I told him a second-place medal as a freshman is insane,” Raffin said. “I'm excited to see what he's doing. I'll definitely follow along because in three years who knows where he will be.”
Going into the meet, Nallenweg thought Bloomington North would win it and the athletes seemed to favor Franklin Central.
As it turned out, Bloomington North won with 39 points, edging Franklin Central with 36 points. Avon (33) and Brownsburg (27) were the only other schools to finish ahead of Chesterton (26).
A hamstring injury to Rylan Hainje didn’t help the cause of Franklin Central, seeded No. 1 in the 4x400 relay with a time of 3:13.54. He suffered an injury during the 4x100 relay and athletes who saw him on the ground after it wondered whether he was done for the night. He was not. He had one more race in him, the 300 hurdles, but not two and was ultimately scratched from the 4x400 relay, and Franklin Central finished fourth. A first-place finish in the 4x4 would have vaulted the team into a first-place finish in the state.
Hainje successfully defended his state titles in both hurdles races and broke his own state record in both with times of 13.16 and 35.26.
Vaughan and Raffin were particularly interested in Hainje’s status as they prepared for the 300 hurdles.
“He basically crawled to the start line because of his hamstring,” Vaughan said. “Then he lined up and that’s when I knew, ‘OK, now I’m not going to win.’ I came around the curve last, I mean dead last, and I finished fourth in my heat, fifth overall.”
A first-year hurdler, Raffin finished 14th, clocked in 39.03.
Chesterton’s athletes raved about Hainje’s ability.
“He’s on a different level,” Raffin said. “There are a lot of fast people in Indiana right now.”
Raffin included.
Nobody at the meet was more impressive than Westview senior Noah Bontrager, who broke his own 1600-meter record by running a 4:01.83 and broke a 14-year old record in the 3200 with an 8:47.57.
He will run at Notre Dame this coming year.
Chesterton didn’t have anyone at that level but did have one freshman (Phillips), two juniors (Moore and Spencer Martin) and six seniors (Ray Hundt, Raffin, Will Roberson, Zarek Sierazy, Vaughan, Wisniewski) competing at the meet.
The Trojans’ 4x800 relay team finished 20th with second leg runner Hundt and anchor man Martin running the best splits of their lives and leadoff man Sierazy running close to his best split. Martin passed four or five runners during his two laps and ran a split of 1:56 and change, distance coach Tom Moeller estimated.
“Top five in the state. Can't complain there,” Nallenweg said. “Honestly everybody performed the way we wanted them to perform. Nate jumping something that would have won the past five years. Nate medaling in the 300s, then our 4x1 finishing second in the state, our 4x4 finishing second.”
The Trojans all delivered in a big way on the biggest night of their track careers.
“Sometimes you underperform at the state meet, sometimes you overperform,” Nallenweg said. “We definitely performed to our potential, I would say.”