Luke Martens '24 Recruiting Profile

My name is Luke Martens and I swim for Fox Valley Swim Team in Naperville/Aurora, Illinois and Waubonsie Valley High School’s Varsity Swim Team in Aurora, Illinois. I am part of the class of 2024, and my best events are mid distance-distance free, IM, and butterfly. I have been swimming competitively since I was six years old, and for a while did swimming alongside other sports, the biggest one being soccer.

 I have always had a passion for swimming, ever since I started the sport, and as a lot of boys my age did, I played several sports. The two I played competitively for years were swimming and soccer. Due to my schedule, I was only able to attend swim practice 4 days a week. By the time I was 14, I was still dropping a lot of time, but I knew that if I wanted to accomplish my goals in the sport, I had to fully commit to swimming. At the start of January in 2020, I came to every practice and I was, in turn, performing better at practice, getting faster and training harder than I ever had before. At the end of the season, I qualified for state, only for the meet to get cancelled due to COVID. Those two and a half months at the start of 2020 taught me that I had something special with swimming though, and once the pandemic hit, it gave me plenty of time during the day to train, despite the limitations it brought. Our new head coach, Rob Busby had immediately partnered with a program called SwimStrong Dryland in order for our team to be able to continue to train during the shutdown. I immediately took full advantage of this program, doing every workout either on zoom with Fox or on my own. I treated it so seriously that I developed a reputation for it among my coaches and teammates. Soon, we were back in the water, and I worked even harder there because COVID was still around with no vaccine, in the suburbs of Chicago, where the virus was very prevalent. Our season could’ve been canceled any day. Everyday was a gift, I was very lucky to have a coach in Rob Busby that tried his absolute best since the beginning of the shutdown to find us a pool to train in. That’s still how I approach practices to this day, an opportunity to improve. Furthermore, this is my same attitude towards my academics. If my grade is not where I want it to be, I treat the next day as an opportunity to help improve my grade in whatever way possible, and I think my GPA reflects that. 

I’ll never forget what my high school coach Chris Haganbaumer said at our end-of-the-year banquet after my sophomore season. He said, “I knew some swimmers that had a work ethic like you wouldn’t believe and I think Luke is right up there with them. Luke will not stop. I don’t care if he’s coughing or dying, he’s going to continue.” I am dead set on wanting to swim in college because this is my obession at the end of every single day, and I would love to contribute my athletics and academics to the best college for me.