Chris Kramer’s arrival at Huntington North had been anticipated for years. I talked with HNHS basketball coach Eric Foister regularly, and even before Kramer set foot on the court, Foister was already saying Kramer was poised to be the best player in school history. He didn’t stand head-and-shoulders above everyone like Sean Kline did, but the 6-foot-3 Kramer separated himself with pure athletic ability. He was a perfect athlete with a combination of speed, agility, power and intelligence,  and an added level of competitiveness that was off the chart. He demonstrated that on the basketball court, the football field and the baseball diamond. He could have also done it on the track, on the tennis court, or whatever athletic field he had chosen. He was reluctant to play football, but did anyway. He was a running back, quarterback, safety, and never came off the field. He ran to the school career rushing record, looking like he could score on any play, from any place on the field, and thrilled crowds with remarkable feats, including an unbelievable effort in a game against Columbia City. His leap into the end zone was caught by our photographer Andrew Hancock. Against Richmond, he ran for 268 yards and six touchdowns. In baseball, Kramer was “merely” spectacular, setting a school record in batting average as a junior. But he garnered the most attention in basketball, where he played above the rim and at times would take over games. He looked up to Sean Kline and learned how to handle his celebrity, never getting caught up in life as a superstar. He didn’t put up the stats that Kline did, but he still finished with more than 1,000 points for his career and made the Indiana All-Star team. There is one stat that seems hard to believe for someone who hated to lose as much as Kramer did. In all three sports during all four years, Kramer’s teams never won a sectional. But that did not deter from the impact he left on the school and the community. We did a long-form story late in his high school career asking the question whether he was the greatest athlete ever to come out of Huntington County. We used a full front page of the sports section, and talked to people who remembered athletes all the way back to the 1940s. Like with Kline, colleges came calling, many for football. Kramer had NFL potential as a safety, but he wanted to stay with basketball, his first love, and chose Purdue, with a future in the NBA on his mind. At Purdue, Kramer’s tenacious play endeared him to the Mackey Arena faithful, and he became a two-time Big Ten Defensive Player of the Year. He helped lead the Boilermakers from the bottom of the Big Ten to a conference championship. He ended his career with 850 points and a school-record 274 steals. He went on to play with the Indiana Pacers summer league team and was in the Milwaukee Bucks training camp but did not make a final roster. Since 2011, Kramer has put together a solid pro career in Europe with four different teams. When I was selected to go into the Huntington North Hall of Fame in 2011, Chris called me from Germany to offer congratulations, which was really nice. After playing for teams in Russia and the Canary Islands, he is back in Indiana recovering from a knee injury and contemplating retirement. He is married with two young daughters.