Team Skiing - Indiana Water Ski Championships

As an added enhancement for the 67th Indiana Water Ski Championships held on July 23rd, 2016, the host club WSI at Cindonway Shores offered 2 rounds of "team skiing" on the Sunday after the state tournament. This is a new concept being promoted by USA Water Ski as a tool to develop more interest in tournament water skiing. The teams were created by the tournament director who used previous scores to make the teams of equal ability. This sounds simple but the composition of the teams came under great scrutiny just prior to the beginning of the event. The three teams each had a captain and 5 skiers. The 3 captains were Nate Smith, Casey Contos, and Kim Contos. Participants questioned and argued who got Nate Smith as their team captain? How did it just seem to happen that all the drivers were on one team? How did one team have all the judges? As you can imagine, there was plenty of "trash talk" and numerous accusations at the starting dock. Team captains were visiting the scoring booth asking for individual skier information/statistics. Team members were on the shore rooting for their teammates. The Nate Smith Team came in second (even though team captain Nate ran 1 @ 43' off!), The Casey Contos Team (also known as the "see you Nater" team) came in first. The Kim Contos team came in third. This 2 round tournament turned out to be one of the most enjoyable events of the weekend.