Years after his dad drowned, this Commanders starter is teaching kids to swim

“He literally asked me, ‘You want to come with me?’ I was like, ‘Nah, I’m just gonna stick back here and throw the football around.’ And I just remember seeing him walk out — as a kid, everything seemed bigger — but maybe like 40, 50 yards deep into the water. And then he — I saw his hands waving at me, and he just dipped underwater.”

People rushed out to help, but when they got there, they couldn’t find his father. He had been dragged under by a rip tide.

“Forty-five minutes later, he floated back,” Lucas said.

“At the age of seven, I was out of having a dad, out of having my best bud, my best friend, my greatest — my best teacher, you know what I’m saying? Like, the guy that was put in this world to give me all the game that I’ve been searching for since then.”

Twenty-six years later, Lucas is a man, 6-foot-8, 327 pounds, a professional hitter with a goofball grin and the self-confidence he lacked growing up without his dad. Lucas believes his unlikely journey has led him to this moment with the Washington Commanders, where, entering the 11th season of his improbable NFL career, the longtime backup is competing for the huge role of starting left tackle and blindside protector for new franchise quarterback Jayden Daniels.

Lucas, 33, feels he’s doing well early in the competition with rookie Brandon Coleman, and unlike his first shot at being a full-time starter (his second season, with Detroit), he feels ready.

Many players who go undrafted out of college, as Lucas did out of Kansas State in 2014, get chewed up by the NFL. Their moment is darkened by the ever-present possibility of getting fired, and they’re often forced out of the league against their will, broken or brokenhearted. In his fifth year, Lucas was overwhelmed by repeated rejection and tried to quit by ignoring calls from his agent.

It was in those difficult moments Lucas felt his father’s absence most.

“Outside of my coaches and my teammates to push me and tell me I could do this, I haven’t had someone I could call on and just tell them how I’m feeling, what’s going on,” he said.

“It’s really been a me situation. Like, me figuring it out. Me going home and sitting in silence for two hours because I got beat in practice, and I’m thinking about why I got beat and how I can’t get beat no more because I’m on the edge of getting cut, and you know — I’m saying it’s been stressful. ”

As he honed his skills, Lucas has grown mentally tough, observing people around him, looking for “life tidbits” and refining who he wants to be.

In 2018, everything came together. Lucas caught a break, played well in one game for his hometown New Orleans Saints and parlayed it into a job with Chicago, where he shined. In 2020, he signed a two-year deal with the Commanders, and in 2022, he signed another. Last summer, he felt like he finally “filled myself up enough to pour into others.”

And he had an idea how: Swim camp. Every summer, NFL players host youth football camps across the country, and while he saw the value in them, he wanted to do something more personal. He attended pool parties growing up, even after his father’s death, but he still had never gone in a pool deeper than his height.

So he partnered with Son of a Saint, a nonprofit organization for fatherless boys in New Orleans, and figured he could show boys like him how to be a man and teach them a potentially lifesaving skill.

“I live in New Orleans, Louisiana,” Lucas said. “We are currently seven feet under sea level. In New Orleans, we get flooding. Hurricane Katrina, it was flooding for 45 days.”

This year, at his second camp, the only boy scared of the water was too big for anyone but Lucas to hold while learning to doggy paddle. Lucas encouraged him to go into the pool, urging him to fight their fear together.

“Trust me,” Lucas said. “I won’t let you drown.”

Weeks later, Lucas left New Orleans for training camp extra motivated. His girlfriend — with whom he bonded, in part, over missing a parent — is pregnant with their first child, a son, due in early November. Sometimes, when Lucas notices her belly growing, it makes him want to go outside in the sun and practice.

“When he gets here, I just want him to see his daddy doing the right thing.”

Lucas wants to teach his son all the lessons he had to gather from others, such as how to mow the lawn or drive on the highway. He’s picking up even more from Instagram and TikTok. He hopes to one day teach his son to play tackle.

And he wants to throw his son in the water. He wants him to flail on his own at first, to fight to float, because he believes struggling will help his son get comfortable. Even if he doesn’t like to swim, Lucas’s top priority is for his son to never feel how he sometimes felt around water.

“He’s not gonna have a fear of it,” he said.