Luke Richmond founded Norco Diving. He has spent more than 25 years coaching divers of every age and ability, and the feeling he gets when an athlete does something for the very first time has never changed.

A young kid standing at the edge of the three meter board, heart pounding, about to conquer one of the biggest fears of their young life. An elite diver standing on the platform, about to attempt the biggest dive of their career for the very first time. To Coach Luke, those moments carry the same emotional weight. The fear is real. The rush is real. The emotion is real. He knows this because he lived these moments himself as a competitive diver, and he feels them again every single time one of his athletes steps to the end of the board. It keeps him invested, present, and by his own account, young at heart.

In many ways, that investment began before he was old enough to understand it. Luke was born in the summer of 1979, days into the annual session of his father's gymnastics camp high in the Colorado Rockies. Coach Brian rushed down from the mountains to be there for his birth, and a few days later, Luke was brought back up. He spent every summer of his childhood at that camp, surrounded by Olympians, national champions, and coaches who had shaped their sport at its highest levels. They were not distant figures to him. They were family. What he absorbed there was not technique. It was how something worthwhile gets built and how a community holds together long after the season ends, and no classroom could have taught him either one. Those early years, and the relationships forged inside them, live inside everything Norco Diving is today.

His path to becoming a coach was shaped by that same instinct for people. Luke originally studied and competed as a diver at the University of Nevada Las Vegas. When an opportunity arose to coach at the collegiate level, he made the deliberate and difficult decision to pursue it, completing his education at Colorado State University with a degree in Speech Communication and a minor in Coaching. The choice was intentional. Before diving fully into coaching, he had been studying to become an elementary school teacher, and that love of working with young children, of meeting them where they are and building genuine excitement for learning, has never left him. He chose Speech Communication because he believed that the ability to communicate effectively was going to be one of the most important skills he could develop as a coach. That belief has proven correct every single day since.

Norco Diving started with him. Coach Luke founded the program and built it from the ground up into what it is today. The name carries forward NCI Sports, the organization his father built decades earlier, and the world Luke had grown up inside.

His coaching philosophy is something his athletes would recognize immediately, even if they might struggle to name it. He sees every dive not as a complete movement to be copied but as a structure built from individual components, each one foundational to what comes next. When something breaks down, he does not work on the result. He finds the piece that caused it, isolates it, strengthens it, and rebuilds from there. Skylar Williams, a former CSU diver and school record holder who trained under Coach Luke during the 2018-2019 season, described it this way. "Lucas doesn't just tell you what to fix. He helps you understand why it matters and how it connects to the overall performance. When I fell short of my best, Lucas was always there to hold me accountable and motivate me to be better." That combination of technical clarity and genuine personal investment is not a coaching style. It is a coaching identity.

The roots of that philosophy trace back to Morry Arbini, Luke's first diving coach and, nearly thirty years earlier, the first coach of Dr. Jeff Huber. Huber went on to become a three-time U.S. Olympic Coach, 13-time USA Diving National Coach of the Year, NCAA Coach of the Year, USOC Coach of the Year, professor at Indiana University, published author, and former Director of Education for USA Diving. He dedicated both of his books to Morry and wrote about him in each one, recognizing that what Morry gave his athletes was something no amount of technical knowledge alone could replicate, a genuine and contagious love for the sport of diving.

It was that shared foundation that drew Luke and Dr. Huber together into a mentorship and friendship that continues today. Over the past five years, Dr. Huber has brought a depth of technical expertise that expanded Coach Luke's understanding of advanced training methods, dryland work, and the kind of precision coaching that now lives inside every Norco Diving practice. He has visited the program in person, asked questions that demanded genuine reflection, and sharpened what was already there while opening doors Coach Luke had not yet walked through. In Dr. Huber's own words, "Luke is a master coach of the highest order" and "one of the best, most well-rounded and complete coaches in the country." From a three-time Olympic coach who has seen the very best this sport has to offer, those are not words chosen lightly.

Coach Luke also earned USA Diving's Grassroots FUNdamentals Bronze, Silver, and Gold certifications, a now-discontinued but foundational pathway built around fundamental skill progressions and communicating them effectively to young learners. He was selected to represent USA Diving in the USOPC Coach Accelerator Program, a highly selective initiative placing one representative from each Olympic sport's national governing body alongside the best developmental coaching minds in American Olympic sport.

His return to collegiate coaching came in the 2018-2019 season, when Colorado State University Head Coach Woody Woodard found himself without a diving coach weeks before the season began and reached out to Luke to step in. Luke agreed on one condition. He wanted to see the season through in full, because he did not think it was fair to the athletes to have multiple coaches in a single year. That season re-ignited something. When the full-time position opened, Luke wanted it. He was a finalist against a highly decorated coach with national championship experience at Michigan and Yale. It came down to the two of them. He did not get the job. Shortly after, the University of Wyoming brought him on as a paid assistant diving coach. When that program's head coach departed for the University of Missouri, Luke stepped in as Interim Head Coach and was offered the position permanently. He turned it down, because his home was in Fort Collins and he was not willing to leave it. He stayed on as a part-time assistant for three more years, all while continuing to build Norco Diving simultaneously, before returning his full attention to Northern Colorado and the program he had been growing all along.

The results speak for themselves. Norco Diving has produced multiple Colorado High School State Champions, including a back-to-back 5A State Champion whose path to the podium followed a pattern that became something of a program signature, steady and deliberate upward progress built on trust in a process that does not always show its results right away. Not every diver becomes a state champion. But the trajectory is consistent, and people notice. Athletes from this program go on to compete collegiately and to represent USA Diving at the Junior National level. And many of them, long after their last competition, find their way back. Because Norco Diving is not just a place they trained. For a lot of them, it became home. And home is always open.

There is a certain kind of person who shows up not because the spotlight is on them, but because the work matters. Coach Brian Richmond is that person, and he has been that person for more than fifty years.

Brian Richmond grew up competing as a gymnast at CSU before transitioning into coaching and officiating. He coached high school gymnastics from 1971 to 1988 at four schools across Colorado, guiding his 1984 Poudre High School team to the CHSAA boys state title and earning National High School Gymnastics Coaches Association Coach of the Year honors in 1984 and 1985.

In 1975, he founded NCI Sports (Norco Camps Inc.), a summer gymnastics camp held at Pingree Park high in the Colorado Rockies that would run for fourteen summers and grow into something genuinely extraordinary. Athletes and coaches traveled from across the country to gather at altitude, in one of the most breathtaking settings imaginable, for an experience that had no real equivalent anywhere else. Over those fourteen summers, the camp drew an extraordinary gathering of American gymnastics royalty: multiple U.S. Olympians, Olympic head coaches, and national champions, among them two-time Olympian and four-time NCAA champion Abie Grossfeld, his wife Muriel, the first American woman to compete in three Olympic Games, U.S. Olympic head coach Francis Allen, and Fort Collins native Tom Schlesinger, NCAA all-around champion and 1988 U.S. Olympic Team member. For the sport of gymnastics in America during that era, Pingree Park was hallowed ground. The relationships built there did not end when the camp did. Many of them became quiet, lasting contributors to the success of Norco Diving decades later, a testament to what happens when people build something together in a place they love.

As a judge and official, Coach Brian built a parallel career of equal distinction. He has judged the China Cup, the Goodwill Games, USA Championships, U.S. Olympic Trials, NCAA Championships, and dozens of collegiate conference meets across his career. He is currently recognized as the longest-standing Federation of International Gymnastics (FIG) official in the United States, and was inducted into the National Gymnastics Judges Association Hall of Fame in 2011.

In 2017, he was inducted into the Colorado High School Activities Association (CHSAA) Hall of Fame, and the reason why says everything about who he is. The CHSAA recognizes dedication to high school athletics in Colorado, and what Brian Richmond gave to that world over more than five decades was something rare: total consistency, regardless of the stage. Throughout all of his national and international work, he never stopped showing up for the high school gymnasts who needed him most. Not the future Olympians or the rising stars, but the athletes approaching the end of their competitive road, the ones competing for the love of it, trying to finish well and be seen. Those gymnasts received from Coach Brian the same attentiveness, the same care, and the same honest feedback as anyone competing at the highest levels. That is what the CHSAA recognized. That is what fifty years of showing up actually looks like.

What that background means at Norco Diving is something few programs anywhere can offer: a dryland and aerial movement coach whose eye for body mechanics, spatial awareness, and gymnastic fundamentals accelerates diver development in ways that cannot be replicated from the poolside alone. Coach Brian's contribution to this program is not a supplement to the diving instruction. It is a core part of what makes Norco Diving different.

And yet even that does not fully capture what he brings to the deck each day. His level of care and attentiveness to the things that matter most in an athlete's development can only come from the wisdom earned over fifty years in the sport. His grandfatherly sensibility, paired with that depth of knowledge, makes him truly one of a kind in the coaching world. The athletes who pass through Norco Diving feel it immediately. So do their families.

His career has touched thousands of athletes across disciplines, decades, and levels of ability. The camp at Pingree Park became home to a generation of gymnasts who stayed connected to him and to each other long after the last summer ended. Norco Diving has become that same kind of home for a generation of divers. That is not a coincidence. It is the same instinct, expressed across a lifetime, in every gym and pool and mountain meadow where Coach Brian Richmond has ever shown up to do the work.