When Lucas Lisman was in the fourth grade, he had a baseball coach who “influenced me and helped me become who I am today,” he said in his Senior Reflection.
The coach had a saying he would use to motivate his players about the importance of practice, but he delivered it with a twist: “Perfect practice makes perfect.” Lucas has carried that message with him into his performance on the field and off, and in his school and personal lives.
In football, Lucas, who was a running back on the Fenn team, had to learn a number of plays and routes for running passes. On defense he served as a manager on the field, calling plays and helping his teammates if they couldn’t remember a play. This took significant practice so that he could commit the plays and passes to memory.
In basketball, his other favorite sport, Lucas knows that it’s not enough to practice three or four free throws; he makes himself throw twenty, even forty. His dad made up a game in which Lucas wins a point for each free throw he makes, but deducts a point for each one he misses.
Perfect practice applies to doing homework, said Lucas. He knows that when teachers assign outside reading some students don’t do it, “but I know I need to read it and read it closely,” he said. The phrase even applies to making friends, he added. “At the start of the year I had four or five good friends, but there were so many other boys I hadn’t connected with. I made an effort and now there are about eight who are among my best friends.”
Lucas, whose brother Zack graduated from Fenn in 2013 and is now a student at Rivers School, will play baseball this spring, and in his down time sports plays a big role; he might be outside shooting hoops or inside watching a game on TV. Mostly, he likes to hang out with his friends. He and his dad care for a dozens of fresh water fish that live in a thirty-gallon tank. Lucas is drawn to water, he said in an interview after his reflection; he loves swimming and other water sports and the family spends time on Martha’s Vineyard in the summer.
A member of the Youth in Philanthropy class, a Big Brother to a Lower School boy, and a tour guide on campus, Lucas said math is his favorite subject because “I like solving problems.” When he graduates he will most miss his friends and his teachers—“how caring they are, and how nice.” His favorite Fenn moments will be winning the basketball tourney this winter (“and beating Fay by 30 points”) and going to football practice, “which was so much fun.” Lucas hopes he will be remembered as being “friendly” and for “trying to live Fenn’s four core values.”