At 6-foot-2 in their bare feet, with a standing reach of eight feet, you’d expect twins Hannah and Kelty Luber to command a presence on almost any varsity team.
They began swimming in elementary school. “But the competition was just too stressful,” says Kelty. “And our parents thought swim meets were boring,” Hannah adds.
Next, they tried basketball. “But we weren’t that good at dribbling, and we didn’t understand setting picks,” says Hannah. “And one day I spazzed out and fell backwards and broke both my arms.” Understandable, Kelty adds: “We’re not gymnasts. We don’t know how to tuck and roll.”
Finally, in eighth grade, their parents signed the twins up for water polo. Kelty: “We’d never even heard of it.” Hannah: “And we hated it.”
With water polo a relatively new girls’ sport, the Beaverton, Ore., natives often found themselves playing against high school boys. Which wasn’t so awful, as it turned out. “We got crushes on the older boys,” says Hannah. “And the head coach was really nice.”
Today, the senior sisters are somewhat surprised to find themselves co-captains of the Cardinal women’s squad. “I mean, we’re good at water polo, but we’re not really jocks,” Hannah says. “We love the sport to a certain extent, but we really came to play here because of the program and the coaching.”
And what a ride it’s been. The sisters have competed for the national title three times in four years. In 2002, Kelty was one of six Cardinal players to score in the final game against UCLA, leading the team to its first NCAA championship. This year, Hannah scored one of two goals in the title game, but the Bruins prevailed, 3-2. “They’re both very good in front of the goal,” says coach John Tanner. “They find each other easily and each certainly knows what the other is thinking.”
The second-leading scorer on the team this season with 38 goals, Hannah is the one with cropped, auburn-tinted hair. “Hannah with an ‘H,’ for ‘hair’” as Tanner, ’83, identifies her. That’s the most apparent difference between the two Spanish and Portuguese majors, both of whom speak Spanish, French, Italian and Swahili. In the water polo team photo, the Lubers stand in the center of the back row, with their heads tilted at identical angles—Hannah going right, Kelty going left.
The sisters play marimba and mbira (Zimbabwean thumb piano), and their dad, who served in the Ivory Coast in the Peace Corps, often joins them for a show during Africa Week. “He likes to tell people he played in the Rose Bowl,” Hannah adds. “They’ll ask, ‘What position?’ and he’ll go, ‘French horn.’” In the UCLA marching band, that is.
Tanner turns up in the audience whenever the twins perform. “They have seen every movie I’ve ever heard of, and they’re a reservoir of knowledge of American pop culture,” he says. “They read voraciously and are great conversationalists—in a couple of languages.”
As they prepare for graduation, the Lubers are at ease about the future, even as they agree they’ll likely split up. They might join the Peace Corps, play water polo abroad, go to law school, interpret in hospitals or just relax. “Being apart is not going to be a big deal,” says Hannah. “We tell everyone who asks that the biggest drama is going to be separating all our shoes and clothes.”
