The Early Years
What Lyle’s mother, Tina Yost, recalls from Lyle’s early years was his desire to be a part
of whatever was going on around him. “When he was three and would watch Peter Pan
on the TV, he would pause the movie and leave the room to put on a Peter Pan costume,”
Tina says. “Then he would come back, play the movie and stand on the back of the couch,
taking Peter Pan’s posture.”
Lyle also displayed a remarkable ability to mimic what he saw. As an elementary
school student, he began watching YouTube videos of freerunning and parkour and
eventually taught himself to do a standing backflip. His risk-taking was entertaining,
albeit unsettling, so Tina suggested that Lyle take his talents to a safer environment.
When Lyle was eight years old, she signed
him up for diving lessons at American
Flyers Diving Club in Solon.
His early days weren’t promising.
“He had the ability and the body to be a
good diver, but he was technically a pretty
bad diver,” says his coach at American
Flyers, Marc Cahalane. “On the USA
Diving scene, he was often second to last
or last and he spent a lot of time being
upset and a lot of time not being the best.”
The turning point came when Lyle
was 12. He entered a competition with
dives that had the lowest degree of
difficulty, but he finished with the highest
scoring average. “He realized that he didn’t
have to perform big dives to do well,”
Cahalane says. The fourth place finish
whetted Lyle’s appetite for more.
At 14, Lyle scored well enough at
Nationals to earn a spot on the team
traveling to the 2015 Junior PanAm
Games in Cuba. For Cahalane, the
experience was memorable because it was
Lyle’s first international competition.
For Lyle, the experience was memorable
because he saw that the Spanish classes
he’d been taking at school had real world
applications.
“I remember going to the pool and
there were people speaking English,
Spanish, French, Portuguese — all
these different languages. I made some
friends who were kind enough to let
me stutter along, but I realized that
if I could speak a different language,
then the number of people that I could
interact with would double or triple,”
Lyle says. “So my next goal was to be
able to speak Spanish at the PanAm
Games in 2017.”
Which is precisely what he
did. At the 2017 PanAm Games in
Victoria, Canada, Lyle reconnected
with all of his Spanish-speaking
friends and was paid a high
compliment from the Mexican
coach, whose English was limited.
“He told me that Lyle was 90
percent fluent in Spanish,”
remembers Cahalane. “And then
Lyle went off and spoke to other
kids using their Spanish dialects.
He’s incredible.”