By FRED KRONER
Be careful what you wish for.
In retrospect, Brandon Mattsey is happy that one goal he established as a youth didn’t materialize.
“I originally promised myself I would never try running in my life because it sounded terrible,” said Mattsey, a recent St. Joseph-Ogden graduate, “but I was dragged out to a track practice by some of my friends in seventh grade.
“That’s where I realized I loved the sport.”
Starting out as a sprinter who also high jumped while in junior high, Mattsey developed into one of the area’s premier distance runners during high school.
He’ll get to continue showcasing his talents in the fall when he becomes a two-sport athlete at Decatur’s Millikin University.
Mattsey will participate in cross-country as well as track and field.
His mindset about running changed almost as quickly as he could run 100 meters as a seventh-grader.
“We would always do these 3- to 4-mile runs once a week and I always got the knack that if I continued running, I could be decent at distance events, so the next year, as an eighth-grader, I went out for cross-country,” Mattsey said. “I loved absolutely every part of it, the people, the experiences, but most importantly the fact that I could be very good at it.
“The sport is very much you get out what you put in, and I was willing to put in the work to be the best I could.”
Before settling on Millikin, Mattsey looked into Heartland Community College (in Normal), Eastern Illinois University and Southern Illinois University.
Millikin best met his needs.
“When I started my search for schools, I didn’t know much about what I wanted out of my college experience,” Mattsey said. “I knew I wanted to run in college, but I wasn’t sure where.
“Coach (Andrew) Craycraft (at Millikin) reached out to me to see if I’d be interested and I figured it wouldn’t hurt to check it out.”
Mattsey liked what he found in the Decatur university.
“When I got to campus, from the start I felt at home,” he said. “Everyone seemed to know each other and was very welcoming to me and my family.
“They all seemed very passionate about their studies and their positions on campus. Seeing the facilities and learning about my program was exciting, but it was really the people that sold me.”
By participating in cross-country and track, Mattsey will be active and busy throughout the school year. He’s not worried about an overload.
“I definitely look forward to running at school, and maybe as I transition from high school to college there may be an adjustment to get used to, but one thing about me is that I love track and cross-country,” Mattsey said. “I love the relationships you get to form with people through training as well as the grind of putting in miles every day.
“Most people who know me will tell you I pretty much talk about running all the time as it is, so I’m not too worried about getting too much of it. I look forward to getting to know all of my teammates and coaches very well over the next four years and I think I will be able to balance my sports with my other academics and activities very well.”
Mattsey plans to major in political science, but doesn’t have a clear and locked-in pathway for his future.
“To be honest I’m not someone who plans that far ahead in life,” Mattsey said. “With the last year and a half being very evident of the fact that life can change in an instant, I’m not sure where I’ll find myself.
“I obviously hope to graduate and have a full-time job doing something I thoroughly enjoy. As to what that job will be, I’ll have to wait to find out.
“I’m very excited to see where it takes me with all the internship opportunities I’m already being told about and the connections within the field that Millikin has to offer. I hope to continue running and all that comes with it though.”
Mattsey has treated running as a job throughout high school. He has been diligent in his workouts.
“My favorite event is the 800,” Mattsey said. “It’s one of the most painful events in track, but it makes it just that much more rewarding.
“The 800 can be raced several different ways depending on the field surrounding you. One race will be tactical to see who makes a move at the right time, the next will be an all-out race to see who’s got the most guts.”
When Mattsey started his prep career, he was more of a longer-distance runner.
“When I got into high school I was very much into the mile and 2-mile,” he said. “I thought those were the only events that I could really make a difference in.
“My sophomore year, one of my teammates introduced me to the 800, which was an event that I had never really ran before, but instantly I loved the competitive nature of it.”
He is undecided about his best event and said with preparation, he can be confident at most distances.
“It very much revolves around what it is I’m training for,” Mattsey said. “In high school, I’ve stuck to middle distance events outside of cross-country, but I’m not afraid to move up in distance.”
No determination has been made on which distances he will focus on at Millikin when the track season arrives.
“That’s something I’ll figure out as we get closer to the season,” Mattsey said. “I’d love to continue to race in middle distance events, but I’m willing to go wherever the team needs me most.
“If I can make the largest impact running the 10K, that’s where I’ll go.”
He credited his former high school teammates for getting him properly schooled in running.
“When I was a freshman, most of my teammates were older juniors and seniors who, through the culture that’s been established in the programs at St. Joe, were very much like older siblings to me,” Mattsey said. “Seeing those guys get recruited and running in college made it a dream of mine that I wanted to accomplish.”
The upperclassmen helped Mattsey recognize that running beyond high school was a realistic goal.
“Those older juniors and seniors had a huge effect on me as a freshman,” he added. “They encouraged me to pursue running if it was something I was interested in and insisted that if I kept working the way I was, that I could find myself anywhere I wanted to go.”
Mattsey gave up basketball after his freshman year and devoted all of his energies to running thereafter.
He feels ready to take the next steps in his running career, whatever his role may be.
“I know that I’m beyond prepared to contribute as a freshman,” Mattsey said. “Coach (Jason) Retz (at SJ-O) has done an amazing job providing me with the highest level of training possible as well as giving me every opportunity imaginable to better myself not only as a runner, but also as a person.
“He’s helped me make connections within the running world with very high-level coaches and athletes as well as encouraging me to step into those leadership roles as I became an older member of the team.
“I know my new coaches and teammates at Millikin are already setting me up for success through training. I’ve also seen through my time in this sport that even if I’m not quite fast enough to make an impact as a varsity team member, I can still be a driving force that motivates those other guys to be the best versions of themselves possible.”
Most rewarding for Mattsey for his senior season with the Spartans was simply the opportunity to compete. He, and all spring-sport athletes in the state, missed out on a season in 2020 due to the coronavirus pandemic.
The layoff from competition was difficult for Mattsey.
“I was devastated in the beginning,” he said. “I felt like everything was being ripped away from me and that I was at rock bottom at times, but it was the realization that there would be an end to this, and that there would be opportunities for me to prove myself again that got me out of bed in the morning.
“I started training for the next season the best I could with everything still being restricted due to covid.”
He found it especially frustrating, he said, because of the effort he had put in while preparing for his junior season.
“Going into my track season junior year, I was coming off the best training block of my life,” he said. “I was in the best shape of my life and the workouts I was having in practice were just pointing towards fast times when the season started.
“When the initial shutdown happened, I remember being in disbelief that this was all happening. This was my junior year. I’d worked hard all winter to run fast times and hopefully get noticed by some schools. I kept running 45- to 50-mile weeks even into the shutdown, just hoping that it would pass and there would be some sort of track season to come back to.”
That didn’t happen, but Mattsey eventually saw a silver lining.
“One of the biggest perks this pandemic as a whole has given me though,” he said, “is I’ve learned lots about perseverance and pushing through when times get tough.”
He was more than ready to return to action in the fall of 2020. After a slow start, his results rapidly improved.
“Cross-country this year was a mix of emotions,” Mattsey said. “By the time the season started, we were still under lots of restrictions and my fitness was not where I had hoped it to be going into the season.
“It was difficult to perform well at times when there were very few other people in races that were the same speed as me. As the season progressed, it got better and I started to be more appreciative of the fact that I was getting a senior season to begin with.
“Towards the end of the year, I was finally starting to feel like I was making a breakthrough. I ran the second fastest race of my career on a course that had been one of the slowest in years past and I felt that had I had just a bit longer, I could’ve run some very fast times.”
With more time to condition, Mattsey felt even better by the time the outdoor track and field season began.
“Thankfully the restrictions were being lifted by that point and things were looking a lot better,” he said. “The first couple of meets were strange being dual and quad meets when I’m used to these big 30-team track meets, but as the season progressed the fields got bigger and there was no shortage of competition.
“I was happy with the times I was running and with the way the team was looking. I was very thankful to finally have the opportunity to run at the state track meet after having missed the qualifying standard in the 4×800 by just a second my sophomore year and having the meet cancelled all together junior year.”
Mattsey ran two events at state for SJ-O, which placed fifth in the Class 1A team chase in June. The Spartans were just four points out of second place.
Mattsey was 13th individually in the 800 meters and ran on the 18th-place 1,600-meter relay.
“I was very happy with the way I performed in the heat and being in multiple events that day,” he said. “As a team we came painfully close to getting a trophy, something that on any other day I feel we would’ve accomplished.
“I’m happy with the season as a whole, but determined to get the job done next time around.”
Besides running, Mattsey enjoys fishing and was a member of the We the People constitution team, which competed in the national tournament during his senior year.
