When Grandview Heights High School football head coach Jason Peters asked his 7-year-old son who he wanted to be for Halloween, Peters initially misunderstood.
“Luke!” his son said. Peters’ mind flashed to the “Star Wars” hero – but his vision of robes and a lightsaber didn’t last for long. Instead, Peters had to find a jersey and some cleats. His son had no intention of being Luke Skywalker, he desired to be Luke Lachey – then the star player on Peters’ squad.
“I was like, ‘Why?’” Peters remembered. “He was like, well, ‘When I talk to him, he really listens.’ That’s a 7-year-old that figured that out.”
Lachey’s empathetic and kind demeanor is easy to spot – starting with the perpetual smile he carries each day. The youngest of five siblings growing up in Columbus, Ohio, Lachey blossomed in a competitive household. but knows the value of being supportive. This past is what guided Lachey on his path from a two-way player at Grandview to the starting tight end at Iowa – a role cut short last year due to a season-ending leg injury.
The sudden shift from playing to watching still had its difficulties, but Lachey emerged from a months-long rehab not only physically repaired, but also mentally fortified. While the game of football is only temporary, Lachey wants to make his impact last outside the lines.
“You never take football for granted,” Lachey’s father Jim told The Daily Iowan. “Every play, every snap is important. You hear that all the time when you’re playing but you’re just, ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah.’ But when you get it taken away from you, you kind of reinvest, so to speak.”
Stranded on the sidelines as the Hawkeyes earned a 10-win season in 2023, Lachey had to cope with not playing the game he grew to love. In doing so, he turned his attention to the others around him.
“I’m going through a tough time, and no one wants to go through that,” Lachey said. “But I didn’t want to be somebody that was going to take the energy away, because I knew it wouldn’t help the team win.”
Learning to embrace the game
From an outsider’s perspective, football would appear to be the natural path for a young Luke Lachey. Jim was a lineman at Ohio State from 1981-84, earning first-team All-American honors in his final season before being selected 12th overall in the NFL Draft, enjoying an 11-year professional career, three All-Pro nods, and a Super Bowl ring. Yet even though Lachey worked the sidelines as a ball boy since he was a third-grader, football wasn’t his main love.
On an autumn Saturday afternoon, the Lacheys would invite neighbors to watch the Ohio State game. At halftime, the kids would break out into the front yard to toss a football, but Lachey wanted no part in the pickup game. Instead, he’d take a basketball and jog down to the family’s hoop, shooting baskets by himself.
“He was the youngest one, so he probably was like, ‘Yeah, I’m going to get nailed. I’m not going out there,” Lachey’s mother Ann said with a laugh.
Even if the basketball court was a means of protection, the sport still dominated Lachey’s attention as a kid. With LeBron James making nightly head-turning highlights for the NBA’s Cleveland Cavaliers, Lachey said it was easy to be a fan of the sport. Plus, he had easy access to a basket all year round.
Lachey’s family had a backyard pool with a hoop attached to the edge, and on summer days Lachey could be found wading through the water, heaving up shots. He and his older brother James would engage in routine one-on-one battles, Luke being the better shooter but bigger James often overpowering his sibling underneath the rim.
When the weather turned cold, the hoop was transported to the basement, where Jim usually got the best of Luke in games of H-O-R-S-E. His signature shot – lining up at the free-throw line and bouncing the ball off the floor and into the cup. Jim said he would practice the move when Lachey wasn’t around, and his son could only watch in dismay as his father would put the game on ice.
“I used to call it, ‘The Crier,’” Jim said of the shot. “[Luke] said, ‘Why do you call it, ‘The Crier?’ I said, ‘Because as soon as I make it, you’re going to start crying.’ And he would, he was so competitive.”
Despite growing up in a competitive environment, the importance of being supportive wasn’t lost on Lachey. As the youngest, he always had to attend his siblings’ sporting events, but Jim said he would never complain.
“He always wanted to go,” Jim recalled of Lachey. “Sometimes he’d go before we’d go and get a ride with our daughter.”
When Lachey got to high school, he had the opportunity to play alongside James on the varsity basketball and football teams for two years. During that time, he was still compelled to hit the hardwood. Ann remembered how as soon as a summer football practice ended, Lachey would take his basketball and high tops and hustle to the gym.
“We literally thought we were going to be sitting inside basketball arenas, not worrying about how many coats we had to bundle up to keep warm,” Ann said.
It’s not that Lachey never loved football. His parents recalled how a young Lachey would lay on his back in the living room, tossing a football up and down to himself. But when his sophomore year rolled around, Lachey felt like he had to make a decision, and he was leaning towards hoops. Hearing the news, Ann wasn’t going to accept her two sons splitting apart.
“I’m like, ‘Nope, you’re playing because your brother is playing. You’re both going to be doing this together,’” Ann said. “And you know, Luke was obviously very happy that he was put in that situation and we would not let him quit.”
As the fall foliage shifted to hues of red and brown and the practices and games began to pile on, Lachey grew to embrace football that season. A full-time starter at wide receiver for Grandview Heights, Lachey once caught a long touchdown pass from James, who stepped in as emergency quarterback late in the season.
In the stands watching the ball spiral toward her youngest son, Ann’s mind alternated from excitement to nervousness. She knew that if Luke didn’t catch the ball, there would be endless squabbles between the siblings about who was to blame.
“Luckily he caught it and scored, so we didn’t have to worry about that,” Ann said.
“The rest is history,” Jim added.
The score was one of six receiving touchdowns Lachey had that season. James – the state’s Defensive Player of the Year for Division IV that year – went off to Bowling Green to continue his career. For Peters, the chance for Lachey to compete outside of his brother’s shadow exposed his true self.
“Luke really enjoyed playing with his brother, but then he also enjoyed playing without him,” the coach said. “He wasn’t James’ little brother anymore. He was just Luke. He got to be more of himself.”
Lachey continued to play basketball as an upperclassman, but his football skills shined too bright to ignore. Starting at wideout, cornerback, and kick returner as a junior, Lachey scored 14 total touchdowns, notched three interceptions, and nearly doubled his receiving yards from the previous season.
“There’s a lot of 6-foot-6, 6-foot-7 kids that are 230 pounds who play basketball and that are very athletic, but when you transfer that over to his skill set in football, that number goes way down,” Peters said of Lachey. “I think that was a part of it. He saw the opportunities he was going to have in football.”
Bowling Green offered Lachey a spot on the basketball team, but the hype around Lachey in football couldn’t be contained. Kentucky reached out in June 2018, and after Lachey’s junior season, Michigan State, West Virginia, Georgia Tech, and LSU expressed their interest in the 247 Sports four-star recruit.
Lachey and Ann flew to Iowa City in June 2019 for an official visit, where former Iowa standout and current Detroit Lion Sam LaPorta showed him around campus. On the flight back, Ann remembered her son gushing about the fun he had, and less than a month later, Lachey committed to the Hawkeyes.
“With [Iowa head coach Kirk] Ferentz being here, with all the change in college football, knowing that it was going to be stable there was great,” Lachey said.
Even though Lachey found a home in Iowa early on, Peters said the tight end wasn’t too comfortable with all the outside attention from Power Five schools. Lachey may have been a future Hawkeye heading into his final season with Grandview, but he stayed true to the Bobcats. For all his accomplishments, Lachey didn’t see himself as larger than the team. When Lachey goes back to Grandview to sign footballs and other memorabilia at fundraising events, he thanks Peters for letting him return.
“He’s a pretty humble kid,” Peters said. “When you talk to him he doesn’t talk about himself; he talks about the team and everybody else. He’s the last person he’ll ever talk about. He downplayed it all.”
Lachey was thrust further into the spotlight during his senior year when the Bobcats’ top two quarterbacks went down with injuries before the playoffs began. Peters turned to Lachey to take over the position in Grandview’s first-round matchup against Paint Valley.
Standing near midfield, Lachey took the snap and dashed towards the end zone for a score, which proved to make the difference in the Bobcats’ seven-point victory. Running off the field after the touchdown, Lachey didn’t gloat but rather pointed out his own mistake of not following the intended route. This “brutal honesty” is what sticks with Peters today.
“He comes off the field and he’s like, ‘Coach, I think I went the wrong way,’” Peters said. “I said, ‘Luke, you went the wrong way, but it’s OK.’ I’m not going to yell at a kid for scoring a touchdown.”
In his final season with the Bobcats, Lachey, a team captain, had 741 receiving yards and rushed for another 357, scoring a combined 10 touchdowns while also grabbing five interceptions on defense. Despite not playing much tight end during his prep career, Lachey’s size suited him for the position at Iowa, where he once again had to wait for his opportunity.
Exiting on his own terms
Lachey redshirted his first season in Iowa City but started three games at tight end the following season while backing up LaPorta, who led the Hawkeyes in catches and receiving yards in 2021. The same would occur in 2022, where Lachey earned six starts but still had 30 fewer catches than his counterpart.
Lachey still enjoyed his time under the tutelage of LaPorta and other Hawkeye veterans, who taught him the intricacies of route running and blocking.
“Just understanding the game conceptually and being able to play faster,” Lachey said of where he’s at now versus his first season. “Obviously, my ankle is a little bigger than it was when I came in my freshman year, but you just learn a lot.”
The tight end’s comment about his ankle is in reference concerns his season-ending injury in 2023. With LaPorta off to the NFL, Lachey was finally at the top of the depth chart and over Iowa’s first two games that season caught 10 passes for 131 yards.
In the first quarter of the Hawkeyes’ contest against Western Michigan, Lachey broke open in the flat and leaped up for a grab, but was taken down by a Bronco defender who toppled on the tight end’s legs. The ball fell loose for an incompletion, but Lachey remained seated on the turf, his right ankle lying limp.
Even with a set of binoculars in hand, Ann couldn’t make out much of the play from the Kinnick Stadium stands behind Iowa’s bench. She said she was glad to have not seen it but took solace in watching her son manage to walk off the field with the help of his teammates.
“[Lachey] got up and said he kept thinking about Jim, because Jim always said, ‘I’ve never gotten carted off the field. I’ve always walked off.’ So that’s what he was thinking about the whole time. He’s like, ‘I’ve got to get up.’”
Once on the Hawkeyes’ bench, Lachey flashed his mom a thumbs-up before heading to the locker room, where he emerged with a walking boot on his foot. After the game, Ann found out her son would have surgery in two days, putting his 2023 season to a close.
“It just breaks your heart because he’s worked so hard and is hoping to have a good season,” Ann said. “But he had a great attitude. He was always positive about it, so that made me feel like I’ve got to be the same way. I can’t be sad about it when he’s positive and not blaming anybody.”
Jim calls Ohio State football games on the radio, so he wasn’t in attendance for the injury. Jim said he was less sympathetic than his wife. For him, Lachey’s injury was a “welcome to the club” moment, as the father missed the entire 1993 NFL season with a knee ailment.
Football doesn’t lack violence, Jim explained, and when removed from the action, it can feel like a lose-lose situation. When the team wins, you feel as if it didn’t need you, and if it lost, you feel like you should’ve been there to contribute. To help his son avoid this mindset, he told Lachey to just keep being supportive, the same as he was to his siblings.
“If you’re not in there, then you got to be the best teammate possible,” Jim said. “Help your backups, make sure that they are ready to play. Be a team guy.”
Wanting to be there for his teammates, Lachey was bent on traveling to Penn State to watch the Hawkeyes take on the Nittany Lions the following week. Ann said while one of the Iowa coaches told him he could make the trip, the team doctor recommended against it. Lachey and his mom opted to watch the game from his house in Iowa City as the Hawkeyes were routed, 31-0.
“That Penn State game kind of killed him,” Ann remembered. “When I was sitting there watching with him, I was like, ‘Oh, I want to be somewhere else right now.’ Because he’s mad that someone’s not catching the ball or running the wrong route.”
While Lachey was susceptible to frustration at first, he didn’t let the anger fester. The tight end said he was confined to a scooter for the first five weeks after his surgery, and with extra free time on his hands, got into literature – specifically a book, titled, “The Energy Bus,” by Jon Gordon.
Lachey explained that in life, the bus driver is joy, and in order to go places and find success, one has to maintain exuberance and not be an “energy vampire.”
“It’s hard when guys get their season taken away from them,” Iowa linebacker Jay Higgins said. “Usually, you see guys go be by themselves, and rightfully so. But [Lachey] was one of those guys who didn’t miss a practice, showed up every game … doing his best, trying to help coaches. Guys on the team can appreciate that.”
Despite not playing a majority of last season, Lachey was voted a team captain ahead of the 2024 season. Before his teammates could elect him to the position, the tight end had a decision to make – either stay with the Hawkeyes for an extra season of eligibility or follow in his father’s footsteps and head to the pros.
A few days before Iowa’s Citrus Bowl matchup against Tennessee, Lachey revealed he would be back with the Hawkeyes, contributing part of his decision to some of Jim’s advice.
“‘The NFL is great and if you want to do that, I’m all behind that too,’” Jim remembered telling his son. “‘If I ever had a dream about playing football again, it’s always with my college roommates, my college teammates.”
After a months-long rehab process featuring pool workouts and hours on a stationary bike, Lachey made it back on the practice field by spring camp. Towards the end of camp, the tight end remembered making a corner route on Iowa safety Quinn Schulte and making the catch despite heavy coverage.
“I was like, ‘Oh, that’s nice.’ It felt good to do that again,” Lachey said with a smile.
Four games into his final season with the Hawkeyes, Lachey has been the team’s second-leading receiver, but only has 97 yards as Iowa has increasingly relied on running back Kaleb Johnson to do the heavy lifting. But Lachey doesn’t mind – he knows there are always opportunities to make a block or get open, and most of all, remembers that his opportunity at Iowa isn’t permanent. From a second-stringer to an injured reserve player to the starting tight end making a homecoming on Saturday, there are always moments to treasure.
“His love of the game, his love of Iowa, and his love of his teammates, all those things were reinforced after he got injured,” Jim said. “You know, this is not the way you want to go out, you want to go out on your own terms. And now he’s got that opportunity.”