BLOOMINGTON – East Noble senior Nathan Mueller showed little emotion after winning the 300-meter hurdles at Friday’s boys state track meet.

Even after finishing first, Mueller was still a little disappointed. Ever the perfectionist, Mueller was expecting more – or in this case, less.

Mueller won the event in 38.24 seconds.

“Lately I have been hitting that sixth hurdle, and I hit today too,” he said. “I have hit it the last three times I have ran. That’s something to work on.

“(The lack of celebrating) was because of my time mostly. I am a person who is a little tougher to please. I didn’t get into the 37s, which is what I wanted.”

Despite a seed time of 38.99 coming in, Mueller was still confident of a state championship.

“I came into this fully expecting to win it,” he said. “I knew I could as long as I ran what I am capable of.

“I knew I had to set my mind that this was my race, and it wasn’t going to go any other way. I had the mindset that nobody was going to beat me today.”

Mueller came in fifth in the 110 hurdles.

The Snider team was disappointed at state for a second straight year.

Snider finished fourth with 32 points Friday after coming in 10th last year when it was the top-ranked team. Center Grove won the event with 50 points, while Lawrence Central was second with 46.

The No. 3 Panthers got off to a rocky start with a dropped baton on the first exchange of the first running event – the 3,200 relay.

Snider finished second with a 7:42.78. Lawrence Central won the relay in a state meet-record time of 7:38.62.

The baton exchanged from first leg Shauntis Lewis to second leg Adam Williams hit the track before Williams picked it up and got on his way. Kendal Frederick and Mitch Dutton were unable to make up all the difference over the next two legs.

“We dropped the ball in the four-by-eight, and I was looking at Shauntis, and I looked away and looked back, and I was like, ‘What happened?’ ” Dutton said. “We were still trying to win, but their anchor ran really fast. It was all we could do to get second.”

The Panthers also got a second place from Dutton in the 800 and a third from the 400 relay team of Derrick Carlisle, Love Kimble, Darin Barbour and Akeim Kelsaw.

Snider’s defending state champion 1,600 relay team finished in 11th.

The team had to run without Lewis, who pulled up with an apparent injury at the start of the 400.

Mueller was the lone state champion from northeast Indiana as Bishop Dwenger’s David Schipper (pole vault) and Huntington North’s Travis Gerding (discus) were state runners-up.

“I was very pleased about how I threw in both events,” said Gerding, who finished fifth in the shot put. “It was a nice way to end my high school career.”

Gerding got his personal best in both events and broke the school record in the shot put at 60 feet, 11 inches.

Schipper went over 16 feet as did defending state champion Drew Volz of Bloomington South, who won on a misses tiebreaker as neither cleared 16-3.

gjones@jg.net