Ski team "SPANKS IT"

Jason Sykes
Daily Staff

After just one day of competition at last weekend's Western Conference Championships, Washington's water skiing club knew it had secured second place and the automatic national championship berth that went with it.

'We were only in second place by five points,' said UW coach Sean Muller, 'but we knew we had it because our jump is so much better than [third place] Chico State's.'

Muller's confidence in his jumpers' abilities was well founded. The team entered Sunday's jumping event leading CSU 1130-1125 and exited with a decisive 735 point edge: 3,745-3,010. Both teams finished second to Arizona State University which tallied an even 5,000 points to claim the championship as well as the other automatic national championship berth.

All five UW men competing posted personal bests and four finished in the top 10, led by Will Dann's 163-foot conference-record-shattering jump. Amy Sharpf led the women with a 112 foot jump, the best on the day.

'I spanked it,' said Dann, 'our [whole] men's team spanked it.'

'Spank' is skiing slang for a particularly impressive jump, and Dann's was the most impressive jump on a day when the conference record fell twice.

Jared Heimbigner — a junior attending ASU on a water skiing scholarship—surpassed his own record of 157 feet with a jump of 162 early in the day.

Heimbigner's new mark stood for about ten minutes, before Dann — a freshman who worked during the summer to help pay for school — erased it with his second attempt.

Dann and the rest of the UW jumpers' impressive performance may have clinched the automatic berth for the team, but it was the work of the slalom and tricks squads that gave UW its five point lead after Saturday.

Led by Brock Laughlin and Nigel Steere, the men finished second to ASU in both of Saturday's events while the women finished fourth in slalom and fifth in tricks out of a six-team field.

Laughlin's 56 points trailed the day's best by only eight points and was good enough to earn the sophomore fifth place. Brady Herder finished in a three-way tie for seventh and Brad Rock took tenth.

Sharpf recorded 44.5 points in the slalom placing her sixth, but no other UW skier finished in the top 15.

Steere's 3,080 point total in the tricks event was the highest in the club's four-year history and was 570 points better then the second-place total. Dann and Rock each broke the 1,000-point mark in finishing sixth and eighth, respectively.

Muller attributed Steere's record-setting run to the difficulty of the tricks he attempted.

'[Doing] three flips racks up a lot of points,' he said.

On the women's side, Michelle Emerson and Heather Meyer each totaled 590 points and tied for 10th overall. Debbie Hannula contributed 500 points but was the only other UW skier in the top 20. Although the team finished fifth, their 410 point total was only 90 off CSU's second-place mark.

The women needed to keep close to CSU since water skiing combines the men's and women's team totals to decide overall placement.

Linking the two squads' scores helps to heighten the sense of 'team' in this individually-oriented sport.

'Everybody on the team feels like they're part of the person skiing,' Laughlin said.

Some of the skiers even live in the same house as their coach. Muller, at age 23, is only one year removed from competing for the team he founded when he arrived at UW in 1993.

'I wanted to go ski for a team,' Muller said, 'I thought about going to Cal but I just stayed here and founded one instead.'

Even after he finished his degree last year Muller found it too difficult to depart.

'I can't let go of it,' he said. 'I love it too much.'

So he stayed and continued to build on a team that finished seventh at the National Collegiate Water Skiing Association Championships last year.

Dann and Scharpf are two freshmen Muller recruited during one of his frequent trips to amateur ski competitions in the Northwest.

'We're probably the best ski team from a Northern school,' Muller said, pointing out that Southern schools like ASU are more likely to award athletic scholarships to skiers and consider water skiing a varsity level sport.

Laughlin agreed.

'We're probably the best team [overall] that doesn't give scholarships.'

Since they are not funded by UW's Athletic Department, the team raises money for trips through fundraisers and private donations. They also get equipment through sponsors like Correct Craft, which provided all the skis, tow handles and accessories for the team this tournament.

Their plight is certainly not unique among water skiing programs across the country, as is evidenced by the fact that only six of the Western conference's 17 teams made the trip to the championships. The other 11 had either exhausted their funds or didn't want to use what little money they had left to compete in a meet they had little chance of winning.

'We're competitive just like any team,' Muller said.

Dann added, 'we're just burdened with the label of ‘club sport.'