FGCU student wins ice dancing national championship

You can find Lucas Appel five days a week, four hours a day, on the ice at the recreation rinks at Hertz Arena, going through his ice dancing routine.

“He’s from musician family and probably musician blood but he can he’s body can explain what music say,” Marina Mzoueva, Lucas’ coach, said.

Practice makes perfect, especially as he’s seen the discipline get more competitive each year.

“It just opens the door for so much more talent to be up against and it really pushes you to be the best you can be,” Appel said.

Appel has won at the national and international level. He won the US Senior Solo Dance National Championship in 2022, but fell short of repeating last season. So, this season, he was focused on redemption.

“I think I pushed myself a little too much because kind of halfway through the season, I was already starting to feel burnout,” Appel said. 

Besides competing, Appel is a sophomore psychology student at Florida Gulf Coast University and even coaches at Hertz Arena.

“I really have to gage week by week and see okay how am I doing,” Appel explained. “How’s my body feeling? How’s my mind feeling? And what do I have the responsibility around me going on?

All of Appel’s hard work paid off when the results came in and he was named a national champion again.

“I couldn’t really hear the score when they said it,” Appel recalled. “So I’m like did they say I’m in first? Did they say I’m in first? And I’m frantically having one of my coaches check her phone and it pops up that I won and I immediately start sobbing. I immediately start crying. I go out into the lobby area of the rink and all my friends see me. They give me hugs. My parents are crying. It was an amazing feeling of just wow I have to put faith and trust in myself and my coaching team because we did it. We did it again.”