The Park Rapids Wavemakers did a tremendous job competing in the Lake Superior Dragon Boat Festival – coming in at 6th place! We're so proud of this incredible team!
Year end party for current / past / and future paddlers and friends is coming up on September 14 – details to be announced!
This message says it all – from Wavemaker paddler Chris Oppitz to the rest of the team:
18
I want you all to remember that number because it is both the number of seconds we shaved off in the second heat as well as the number of places we jumped in the process. If this is your first year paddling, we just did something NOBODY does. Teams don't just jump from the Bronze division to the Gold division willy nilly. They don't just leapfrog HALF of all teams at the festival in their second attempt. And they certainly don't take eighteen seconds off their time in a competition where tenths of a second often separates places. I've never been so excited to learn we'd thrown ourselves out of medal contention as I was on Saturday.
One of the things I like about the Superior race is that they only count a team's faster time (unlike in Bemidji where the two times are added together). It allows us to try, for instance, a different boat configuration and a different stroke rate (two things Katy & Gail did) without fear of ruining what might already be an optimized combination of these factors. It's kind of a "nothing to lose" situation.
What we did Saturday demonstrates something that I find both exciting as a paddler and daunting as a coach, and that's that 23 committed people showed up who'd been training and who are a Gold Division team; a Gold Division team who pins on their leadership team the task of figuring out the right combination of at least a dozen factors to allow them to show what they are capable of. I can't promise we'll always get it right in the future, but I can tell you we learned some things that we will not forget going into next season.
Chris
