You probably heard this one before. A Peuster is signing to run for Benedictine College.

Mexico senior Andrew Peuster signed on Thursday, March 13 to run cross country and track and field for the NAIA school in Atchison, Kansas. Peuster will join his brother Thomas Peuster, who ran for the Bulldogs a couple years ago. 

“I’m definitely excited about it,” Andrew Peuster said. “It definitely has been something I’ve been working on for several years, running over and over again. At the same time, I’m nervous too since it’s a new chapter in life.”

Peuster has been distance running for Mexico for six years and is coming off an all-conference cross country season in the Bulldogs’ second straight North Central Missouri Conference championship. He has qualified for the state cross country meet once in his career and has one more track and field season left.

Looking ahead, Peuster is looking forward to making new friends at Benedictine while he majors in engineering physics but is glad to have someone he knows there. It is someone he obviously knows very well in his older brother.

“It will be nice to have someone that I already know,” Peuster said. “It will help me adjust to it and all that.”

Head coach Lucas Breneman said it is nice to see the program send more runners to college, starting with runners like Malik Holman, Jami Brandow, Alex Dukes and Thomas Peuster years ago and then Tyler Grimes and Landon Higgins signing to William Woods the week before. They all are similar in the sense that they are all “workhorses.”

Andrew Peuster is also a workhorse, Breneman said, who has shown great commitment to running in the past and that is the case for the future as well with his signing. 

“Of all of the runners, he’s the most prepared for the next level,” Breneman said. “He’s put in the summer mileage and the work from not just high school but all the way back to seventh grade. I know that he has his best races ahead of him.”

Peuster said family is a big reason why he started his running career. He played sports like baseball and soccer but ultimately found out running was a good fit for him.

“Originally, it was parents who encouraged me and pushed me into doing it just to do a sport of some kind,” Peuster said. “In running, I was finally able to see a sport where I fit in and was able to directly see how my work paid off with performance.”

Breneman said Peuster should be even more comfortable running with his older brother but pointed out the Mexico connection doesn’t end there. William Woods is joining Benedictine’s conference — the Heart of America Athletic Conference — and William Woods is where teammates Grimes and Higgins are going. They will go from friendly competition within a team to traditional competition between opposing teams. 

In the next few years, Breneman is looking forward to seeing that but mainly how they each improve. He said it’s special when a kid has the talent and drive to run past high school.

“Even the people that are naturally good at it, you can’t just show up not putting any of the work in and have a bunch of success,” Breneman said. “You’re not going to compete at the high end. You prepare yourself for that in high school like he has done in the offseason. A lot of college running is done without the coach, so when you can trust that athletes are going to put in the work, that’s huge.”