EVERGREEN — Last summer, Clear Creek High School senior-to-be Sebby Andrade received a text message from Golddiggers basketball teammate Connor Gunderson.
“He said, ‘Hey, did you hear about these two new kids we’re getting from Washington?’ ” Andrade recalled in the school gym this week.
The good news spread fast.
Months later, the two transfers from Tacoma, Wash., — 6-foot-7 junior center Justin Lucas and 6-foot sophomore guard Tevin Lucas — are the leading scorers on a Clear Creek team that won the school’s first boys basketball league championship since 1961.
After winning the Class 3A Frontier League’s regular season and earning a spot in the state tournament, the Golddiggers began district tournament play Friday night with a 45-37 loss to The Pinnacle at Jefferson High in Edgewater.
The Lucas brothers are one set of three brother pairs on the team, joining twins Sebby and Xander Andrade and Jacob and Jared Cook.
“It’s a new dynamic this year with the Lucas brothers moving here,” said Sebby Andrade, the Golddiggers’ starting point guard. “But the Cooks and Xander and I have been growing up here together forever. It’s cool to have that kind of bond on this team. I feel like we’re each other’s brothers, but we’re all kind of brothers.”
Golddiggers coach David Schuessler is a Clear Creek graduate, and his father, David Sr., was a junior on that last league championship team 51 years ago. He said of the Lucas brothers, “You can have somebody move in and they have talent, but to have them be quality people on top of it, that really has been a nice addition.”
How the Lucas brothers came to enroll at the school just off Interstate 70 west of Evergreen is a story in itself. In the Tacoma area, they attended Bellarmine Prep, where their mother, Kathy, was a bank executive, and their father, Walter, was an audio engineer. Last year, though, Kathy’s job was eliminated, and Walter was battling a lung disease. Kathy was offered an assistant manager’s job at a bank in Idaho Springs, and doctors told Walter a move to Colorado would be helpful because he would have access to Denver’s National Jewish Health, renowned for its care of lung, heart and immune diseases.
Side issues were that Justin, now 18, is a straight-A student and considered a math prodigy perhaps destined for engineering or medicine, but he also essentially missed an entire year of school and basketball because of severe post-concussion problems.
“We talked with both boys and with our two (younger) daughters,” Walter Lucas recalled. “Justin was recovering, and we thought that just the change of venue and place would be good for him. He should have been graduating this year with his class, and we thought it would be a lot easier on him in a new place and not having to deal with watching his friends graduate. The headaches were going away and he was returning to his normal self, but I didn’t know if he would be able to play basketball or not. But I think the move here was good for the entire family.”
Justin suffered his first concussion in a game when he was a freshman. “I was diving for a ball and a kid fell on top of me and rolled up over, onto my head,” he said. “I tried to play the rest of the game, but my depth perception when I tried to catch the ball wasn’t good.”
He suffered an additional head injury in baseball, and he now can laugh about it. “I pulled a Jose Canseco,” he said, meaning a ball bounced off his head as he tried to catch it.
But then he suffered a more serious concussion his sophomore season of basketball, and it placed him on the shelf — from basketball and school — for a year.
“I fell into depression a little bit because of not being around friends and not having basketball and sports,” he said. “That’s how I keep busy. … The doctors told me to be a vegetable, pretty much. That was the first few months, and then a new study about concussions came out that said a little bit of exercise can be good for the headaches.” He smiled and said conspiratorially, “I didn’t really follow the doctors’ orders, though.”
He took a couple of classes in the second semester last year and began the 2011-12 academic year as a junior at Clear Creek.
The family first lived near the school, but since has settled in Golden, a compromise between Idaho Springs and the National Jewish site in east Denver. The Lucas sons, though, seem committed to remaining at Clear Creek, one of the lowest-enrollment high schools in Class 3A, with only 240 students in the four grades.
“I like the smaller classroom setting,” Justin said.
Justin entered Friday averaging 14.0 points and Tevin 13.6 for the Golddiggers (16-5).
At stake in the district playoffs, though, was the right to host games in the early state tournament rounds. So Friday’s loss ended those hopes, but didn’t take away from the regular season.
“Winning the league is a great accomplishment we’re very proud of,” Sebby Andrade said.
Terry Frei: 303-954-1895 or tfrei@denverpost.com
