Scott Swanson
Of The New Era
Lucie Davis’ sophomore year as a swimmer at Boise State University started with a low.
Her coach quit, suddenly, right before summer workouts were supposed to begin.
Davis had won four straight state titles in both the 200 and 500 freestyle events while swimming for Sweet Home, and anchored the Huskies to five relay championships, including the state record in the 200 Freestyle Relay, before moving on to Boise State.
Her freshman season for the Broncos went well. They won the Mountain West Conference and she made all-conference in the 500 and 1650 freestyles. An elementary education major and American Sign Language minor, she also was an honorable-mention scholastic All-American and won all-conference scholastic honors for maintaining a 3.50 or better GPA.
Then things went south, in more than one way.
School was out last summer when Davis got the call that Jeremy Kipp, the coach who’d recruited her, had decided to leave for the head coaching job at Northwestern.
Then, halfway through her sophomore season, a team van crash left her unable to swim in the conference championships, for which she’d had high expectations.
But, Davis said, “God makes all things work together for good. So many people reminded me of that.”
And then she experienced just that.
From the low point of her athletic career, she reached what, for her, was an ultimate high: Davis qualified for the Olympic trials earlier this month with a huge personal-best time that shocked her and pretty much everybody familiar with swimming.
Here’s how it went down.
The “crazy year” started with that phone call letting her know her coach was gone.
“Jeremy Kipp was a really great guy and a really great coach,” Davis said.
His departure left the Broncos in some turmoil. It wasn’t just Kipp; the entire assistant coaching staff – all except the academic advisor and their athletic trainer – moved on.
“It was right at the beginning of summer and up until the end of summer we didn’t have a coach,” Davis said. “We went through the entire summer not knowing really what was going to happen.”
Since she was spending the summer at home, she swam in Sweet Home. In Boise, her teammates swam at the local YMCA.
“That was our first big hurdle that we had to get over as a team,” Davis said. “As a sophomore, it’s kind of assumed that you’ll have a little more responsibility. You’re no longer a freshman so there’s more riding on you as well. Sophomore year is just a big year.”
Things stabilized when Boise State alum Christine Mabile was named head coach. She came from being an assistant coach at Missouri and had coached previously at the College of Idaho, just down the road from the Broncos, where she’d led the Coyotes to five NAIA National Championship meets with the women placing in the top 10 during each of her last three seasons.
“It’s a really big deal that she is coaching now,” Davis said. “We had a really great first four months of the season.”
The team trained in Puerto Rico and won all their home dual meets, to maintain an unbroken string of wins at home.
“It was so fun,” Davis said. “We were competing really well. We hadn’t fully rested yet, but it was looking like it was going to be a very promising season.”
Christmas came and went. She went back to school for spring semester, with a meet at Wyoming at the top of the schedule.
En route to the airport at 6 a.m. on Jan. 18, the 13-passenger van in which Davis was riding, along with eight other swimmers and two coaches, was rammed by a hit-and-run drunk driver, whose blood alcohol was three times the legal limit, she said.
They were all badly shaken up and Davis had “huge bruises” on her legs, but no one appeared to be severely injured, at least physically.
Davis and five others continued to Wyoming, along with the rest of the team who had ridden in two other vans. It wasn’t a good idea, she says.
“I don’t think I was making rational decisions at that point,” said Davis, adding she doesn’t recall much of the accident.
When she got to Laramie, Wyo., she swam but “something just felt off.”
Three days later, she realized something was “really wrong with my head.”
She couldn’t stand bright lights; noises bothered her; she couldn’t sleep soundly.
Turned out, she and six of the others in the van had suffered concussions. Three recovered quickly, in time to compete at the conference championships Feb. 20-23. Davis didn’t.
“It took me to the end of March to fully recover,” she said. “I was out of the water. I wasn’t allowed to do anything. I was allowed to go to class and I was allowed to sit in my house.”
She was allowed to travel to Minneapolis, Minn. “just to watch.”
That didn’t go well, she said.
“It was really hard to sit there and just watch everybody swim. But I think it taught me a lot. I learned a lot more about the team and how we operate, how a big championship meet goes, from a different perspective. I have a lot more respect for it now.
“I’m not thankful the accident happened, but I’m thankful I learned from it.”
The biggest obstacle was the mental fallout. She’d been a successful athlete, working hard every day to get better, on the rise, with big goals and expectations. Now she found herself essentially incapacitated.
“I think that’s a part of concussions that people don’t understand,” she said. “They don’t see it. I think I cried for three months straight.”
She says she wrestled with whether she’d ever be able to come back, swim at the level she had before the accident. She had big goals: making the Olympic Trials, the NCAA championships, winning conference titles. She realized how fleeting these things could be.
“The mental health side of it was really hard. There’s nothing fun about that.”
She said there are two mindsets people can have after such an experience: “I can think, ‘Poor me, I don’t want to come back. This terrible thing has happened. This sucks.
“Or I can look towards the future and say, ‘I have two more years.’
“It took a lot of counseling, a lot of time and sitting in quiet, dark places.”
By the end of March, though, Davis was able to start swimming again, and things were different – in a good way.
“There was a new fire in me. I trained like I had never trained before. I lifted the heaviest I’ve ever lifted this summer and spring.”
Plus, she got some other good news.
Oregon State University had decided to end its swimming program, and Sweet Home teammate Lauren Yon, who had swum for the Beavers this year as a freshman, had decided to transfer to Boise State. Yon, like Davis, had been a dominant swimmer for the Huskies, winning a total of six individual state titles in the 200 Individual Medley, and the 100 and 500 freestyles, and swimming on six state champion relay teams, including with Davis on that record-breaking 200 Freestyle Relay.
“It worked out well,” Davis said. “Right before this thing happened, we had already planned for her to come out for spring break. So she almost got to take a second recruiting trip, in a sense. She got to talk to some of my teammates and go meet the coaches and see what it was like. It was really fun to watch her decide to come.
“I’m really excited to have her there,” she added, noting that Yon will likely swim middle distances and the IM. “She’ll be in my lane. It’ll be really fun.”
After training for six weeks, Davis got a chance to test herself in the Boise Y Spring Fling swim meet in mid-May. Boise State was the only college team there, but it was an opportunity for the Broncos who had been injured to gauge their progress.
“I was there with all these little kids and high-schoolers. It felt kind of funny, being the only college team there. It was really close to home.”
But, she said, it was “so fun to watch the little kids looking at you and you really realize at meets like that how they look up to you as a collegiate swimmer. Even the little boys.”
She swam well.
“I swam the 400 as very first event coming back. I was nervous but so excited. And the time actually ended up being really good. My coaches and I didn’t expect it and we realized that this summer could kind of go in our favor. My goals weren’t completely out of reach any more.”
A second meet produced more encouraging results and, on July 18 she found herself at Mt. Hood Community College for the USA Swimming Senior Sectionals. She was trained, rested and ready to go, Davis said.
She was scheduled to swim four events, the 200, 400, 800 and 1500 meters.
The 800 was first. Though she was “really nervous,” it was more excitement than anything, she said.
“I kept on telling telling my coaches I feel that there is something there and it’s stuffed-down and it’s ready. I think it was because it had been a full year since I had rested and seen what I could do. So I was really ready for it.”
She had teammates in the race, including her roommate and training partner, Hayley Hill of Arizona.
Davis dove in and things just “fell into place,” she said.
“I went out pretty fast and pretty strong.”
Her stroke was in synch with the beat of her kick and she had good body position in the water. And she was moving fast.
“I saw right away that I pulled away,” she said. At the halfway mark, she noticed her coach “doing jumping jacks up and down the pool.” Then she saw longtime friends and coaches crowding the deck, cheering her on.
“I thought, ‘Either I’m swimming really well or they’re just excited,” Davis said.
Her father and club coach, Bruce Davis, a former NCAA Division I swimmer himself, said hopes went up as his daughter progressed through the race.
“At about 500 meters, when she was still on the pace she needed to be on, I think everybody started thinking this might be a reality,” he said.
With 200 meters left, she was tiring, but “everybody else was freaking out,” Lucie Davis said. “It hurt so bad.”
Even though she didn’t know what her time was, “I knew I was close.”
She said she thought back to how, as she’d trained over the last year, she’d envisioned qualifying for the Trials.
“I knew my goals. I was able to think back on those and think back on all the really hard practices and just dig in and go for it.”
She touched the wall and looked up at the clock. 8:47.25. Three-quarters of a second under the Olympic Trials cutoff. She was in.
“My dad was screaming and my coaches were screaming. I started bawling. Every single minute of all of the terrible time of that 2½-month period, when I couldn’t do anything, and all the work I have done – counselors, and doctors and trainers, manifested in that moment. And I was able to see it.”
So far, she said, she’s the Broncos’ only qualifier.
“It’s pretty amazing,” Bruce Davis said. “There’s no other way to describe it. She’s had her eye on Olympic Trial cuts since, definitely, four years ago. She’s just a really hard trainer. She keeps her eye on what she needs to do.”
Looking back, Lucie Davis says, she didn’t enjoy the process but the end result made it all worthwhile, even the parts she didn’t plan.
“I learned so much, I’ve grown so much. It’s been so incredible to watch something really bad turn into something really good in so many different areas of my life.”