The tournament featured 14 teams and more than 1,500 athletes. In competitive show skiing, each club has one hour to present a theatrical performance on water skis. Judges score acts by awarding points based on originality, presentation and execution. Elaborate costumes and staging intermix with music and fast action on the water as an announcer leads the audience through the show.
The Aquanuts (Twin Lakes, Wis.) finished second with 1,859.14 points. The Wonder Lake Water Ski Show Team (Wonder Lake, Ill.), with 1,833.38 points, the defending national champion Rock Aqua Jays (Janesville, Wis.) with 1,802.56 points, and the Backwater Gamblers (Rock Island, Ill.) with 1,616.70 points rounded out the top-five placements, respectively. Mad-City is the fifth different team – Aquanuts (2015), Wonder Lake (2016), Ski-A-Rees (2017) and Rock Aqua Jays (2018) – to win the national title in the past five years.
The Aquanuts’ Kailey Koehler (Lake Geneva, Wis.) and Ethan Shulda (Twin Lakes, Wis.) won the Willa Cook and Skip Gilkerson awards, respectively. The awards are given to the tournament’s top female and male performers, as voted on by the tournament officials. Koehler won the Willa Cook Award for the second consecutive year, becoming the first athlete to accomplish that feat since the Rock Aqua Jays’ Janie Dibble in 1989 and 1990. Shulda is a first-time recipient of the Skip Gilkerson Award.
In addition to the team competition, athletes competed individually in swivel, strap doubles, freestyle jumping and team jumping. Molly Schaefer (Wausau, Wis.) won the swivel title, scoring 16.48 points; Cory Krivitz (Hartland, Wis.) and Kim Stoner (Hartland, Wis.) won doubles, scoring 16.86 points; the Sarasota Ski-A-Rees (Sarasota, Fla.) won team jumping, scoring 76.60 points; and Garrett Bouley (Bradenton, Fla.) won freestyle jumping, scoring 901.45 points.
For complete results, visit https://www.usawaterski.org/pages/divisions/showski/2019D1ShowSkiNationalsResults.pdf.
This release was written by the US Water Ski and Wake Sports.
