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WATERSKI MagazineHad Rhoni Barton not swaggered off with every possible women's title at the 1996 Collegiate Nationals in October, it would have been a shock. But she left with her haul for the second straight year, so no jaws fell open.
If a team from outside Louisiana had sneaked into the top spot, there might have been mayhem in Milledgeville, Georgia. Fat chance. The best teams are still in opposite corners of the bayou state, with Northeast reigning for the 13th time in 17 years. So there was no need for riot police.
Southwestern Louisiana's Scott Smith winning men's overall wasn't even a surprise, although his margin of victory over runner-up Kyle Eade of Georgia College (1,655 points to 1,560) was skiing's version of a Super Bowl rout.
The winners were pretty much a given long before the first van of skiers pulled up to the Georgia College site. What the '96 Collegiate Nationals were all about was this: Purdue University, with no individual finishing higher than 20th (Jeff Surdej), reached eighth in the team standings behind the loudest rallying cry of the weekend, “No boat, no site!”
The Boilermakers haven't had either since 1984. For the fall season they trained once a week at a site an hour from their West Lafayette, Indiana, campus, borrowing a Ski Nautique from the Kokomo Ski Club. For the Nationals, the squad turned an eight-hour drive from home into a 15-hour marathon when one of their vans blew an engine. At 8:45 a.m., 15 minutes before the first skier hit the water, the Purdue contingent of 26 skiers and support people unpiled from one van and a Suburban.
“We didn't go there thinking we'd bring home trophies,” says Purdue's club president Chad Kodiak. “Being there was a dream. Finishing eighth was like winning.”
But it gets better. Purdue is actually the official “host” of the 1997 Collegiate Nationals in Wilmington, Illinois, a two-hour drive from the Boilermakers' campus.
