Lucas Lee isn’t the typical diver who shows up at the UIL State Swimming and Diving Championship meet ready to compete for a state championship. He didn’t start diving almost as soon as he could walk, and he had no formal coaching until about 18 months ago.

His first experience on a diving board was at the Abilene Swim Club, where he would perform tricks off the 1-meter diving board on the west end of the pool. A competitive diver friend would tell Lucas what he used to do on the board, and Lucas asked him to teach him a few things. One thing led to another, and that’s when the diving bug bit the junior at ATEMS.

“That’s where I learned to do some of the dives I use in competition now,” Lucas said. “It was a lot of fun, and I decided I would join if there were a diving team in AISD.”

Fortunately for Lucas, AISD has a diving team, and he joined in the summer of 2023 and has been working hard ever since for a chance to dive against the state’s best in the 1-meter springboard competition. Despite not having much formal training, AISD diving coach Jennifer Vancamp said Lucas’s potential was evident from the beginning of his time with the program.

“Lucas showed immense potential from the start because of his willingness to learn complicated dives,” Vancamp said. “He had a strong junior season and improved each week. We focused on each meet individually and reflected by watching the recorded dives and examining the scores judges gave for each dive. We didn’t realize until our district meet that reaching the state meet was possible this year.”

Lucas finished third at the District 4-5A championship meet in Lubbock on Jan. 25 and third again
at the Region I-5A championship meet at the Pete Ragus Aquatic Center in Lubbock. That finish propelled him to the state championship meet in Austin, where he became the first male diver from Abilene High to qualify for the state meet.

“I cried when he received his third-place medal at regionals and that he was going to the state meet,” Vancamp said. “We continued to work hard in the two weeks leading up to State, hoping to make it to finals.”

Lucas didn’t make the final but said the two weeks between the regional and state championship
meet at the Lee and Joe Jamail Texas Swimming Center in Austin were full of hard work.

“I worked as hard as I could in those two weeks, and I improved quite a bit,” he said. “I was focused when I got to the state championship meet because all my work had led me to that moment.”

Lucas said the experience of participating in the state championship meet was more than he could have imagined.

“I had some apprehension about being there, sure, because many people are much better than me,” he said. “I was pretty calm leading up to the competition but I was the third of 21 divers, and when they called my name, that’s when the magnitude of the moment hit me like a train. It was intense.”

But a 20th-place finish left him wanting more. He’s already planning a return trip to Austin, where he wants to finish in the top 10 in diving and swim the 100-meter fly. He’s unsure how to do it because the swimming and diving events run simultaneously. But he will start investigating it when he returns to training in 7-10 days.

“I’m in the middle of two weeks off, but after that, I’m hitting it hard,” Lucas said. “I’ve got to increase the difficulty of my dives and improve my flexibility. Some guys can bend their bodies in half like a pancake, and I can’t, so I have improvements to make. And in the 100 fly, I’ll need to shave 10 seconds off my time, which is a lot. My focus is my senior year and making those two things happen.”