Chesterton High School is just the beginning of many people’s lives. CHS offers many different sports and extracurricular activities that truly have the potential to change lives. From cheerleading to creative writing club, Chesterton is where students can genuinely transform from kids to young adults. Over the years, Chesterton High School has proven itself to be a producer of amazing people. Chesterton’s alumni hold an impressive roster full of successes from doctors and lawyers, to just overall good human beings. A few of these alumni have been successful enough to earn their way to fame.
In recent years, CHS has been heavily recognized for its fantastic basketball team, becoming state runner-up in 2022. However, its history with basketball expands further. Chesterton’s alumni include a few pro basketball players. After graduating from high school in 2008, Zack Novak went on to play for the University of Michigan. In 2012, Novak helped lead their team to a Big Ten Conference Season championship. After that, he went on to play for a professional basketball team in Denmark. Novak received other accolades for his basketball career as well, before starting his career in analytics. Novak is now in construction, agriculture, and mining at the company “Uptake”.
Another CHS alumnus was successful in athletics. Blake Pieroni, a 2014 graduate, made his way to the 2016 and 2020 Olympics for swimming. Both years Pieroni earned gold medals in his respective events. Before making it to the Olympics, Pieroni swam at and attended IU Bloomington. In his years at CHS, Pieroni led the swim team to state victories in his Junior and Senior years. Now, Pieroni is still continuing to swim in Indy.
While this next alumnus swam at Chesterton, his true claim to fame is in a different realm. Taylor Zakhar Perez graduated from Chesterton back in 2010. He was a swimmer at CHS and was reported to be a really nice and well respected guy. However, he had dreams bigger than our small town.
Perez told the Chicago Tribune, “I felt like I had different thoughts than a lot of the high school kids and had different dreams.”
Perez went on to pursue a career in acting which has been a success. Initially, he took on small roles in shows such as “Icarly” and “Scandal”. However, his big break was found in Netflix’s movie “The Kissing Booth 2” with Joey King and Noah Centineo. Perez also recently starred in an Amazon Prime Original Movie, “Red White and Royal Blue”. It’s safe to say that Perez has done alright for himself ever since leaving the halls of CHS.
