Continuously serving Kosciusko County since 1854
An opportunity presented itself, and the next thing you know, the 2018 Supra Boats Pro Wakeboard Tour will wrap up its season Saturday in Warsaw’s Center Lake.
It took a lot of cooperation and coordination to get the tournament in town. The event will crown a tournament and a season-tour champion.
“We worked with Pro Wake Watersports, one of the top Supra Boats dealers, and we work with Supra to choose our venues,” said Jessica Kirchner, who handles public relations with the tour. “They have a great relationship with the dealer here, and the dealer suggested the lake.
“So we came out here, took a look, worked with the city and found it would be a really great stop for the tour.”
“We were in Indianapolis last year, and we felt like Indiana was a real hotbed for the sport.”
Center Lake may seem an unlikely choice for the tournament, as there are several larger bodies of water in Kosciusko County. But Kirchner said the size and in-town location made the Warsaw lake well-suited for such an event.
“It is smaller than a lot of the lakes we’ve been to, but we don’t go to the larger lakes anyway,” Kirchner said. “We like them enclosed, closed circuit, so we don’t have any other wake interfering with the competition.
“This whole lake is a no-wake zone, so it’s perfect; the only wake that’s created on the lake is what we put out.”
A local tie-in for the tournament was to have some students from Wawasee High School come out Friday afternoon to test their wakeboarding skills with a professional-level boat and driver.
“It’s part of a program called ‘Go Boarding,’ where students are into the board sports: snowboarding, wakeboarding, surfing, that sort of thing,” said Kirchner. “There’s students who aren’t into traditional high school sports. It’s modeled after a program in Michigan and the Wawasee principal (Kim Nguyen) knows the person who implemented the Michigan program.
“A lot of the kids have brought boards they made themselves, and are really excited to see how they stand up. I think some are hoping to get Mr. Nguyen on a board, but I’m not sure that’ll happen,” Kirchner smiled.
Among the riders competing Saturday is Cory Teunissen, who is in second place in the season points standings headed into today’s season finale. Teunissen trails Nic Rapa by 15 points, so Teunissen will have to be at the top of his game to take home not only the title from Warsaw, but the season points title as well.
“It’s competitive wakeboarding; you have good days and you have bad days,” said Teunissen, a 20-year-old from Brisbane, Australia, who has called Orlando home during the season for the last nine years.
“My plan is to try and put some good runs down, and if I manage to do that, hopefully everything else plays out for me and it if happens at the end of the day, great. If not, it wasn’t meant to be. It’s going to be an exciting day.”
To have the kind of success he enjoys, and to make a full-time living doing it at a young age, Teunissen clearly got started early in life.
“My dad was into water skiing when he was my age, and I was absolutely obsessed with it,” he said. “ ... I put on my first pair of water skis when I was 3 years old, and jumped on a wakeboard when I was 4. I guess I’ve just kept going at it since.
“I competed in my first event when I was 7 years old, and just sort of followed the groove to the grassroots events, then I did the state events, then the national events. Then that led to going to America for the first time, when I was 9 and competing in Reno.
“That led to me staying in Florida a certain amount of time, and I’ve just kept on with the flow. This is my ninth year living in America, and I’m loving it. I’m absolutely loving it and wouldn’t change it for the world.”
With only four stops on the tour, it might be easy to assume the competitors have to work other jobs to support themselves. But Teunissen said that while this will be his final competition for the year, he also does some exhibitions and, like professional athletes, trains year-round for the next season.
“This is me. It’s a full-time job for me,” he said. “I’m either out in the boat twice a day, or in the gym. It’s a full-time job between training, competing, going on trips, doing this and that. I have no spare time during the season.
“It’s definitely a crazy, crazy job and an amazing experience.”
While the tour isn’t committing to a return to Warsaw, Kirchner said it’s not ruled out either. They want to get to as many different places and expose new fans to the sport.
“We’ve had a lot of success in Indiana, and we’ll look at other locations within the state,” she said. “But it’s easy to imagine coming back to Warsaw someday.”
The tournament will start at 10 a.m. on the south end of Center Lake, and is expected to conclude around 4 p.m. Admission is free.
