Wawasee students leave the docks at Center Lake before doing a little wakeboarding on the lake during a Gone Boarding and Supra Boats Pro Wakeboard Tour event Friday. (Photos by James Costello)

WARSAW — Wawasee High School’s Gone Boarding class got some serious pro tips Friday.

The fledgling program, which enters its second year at Wawasee this fall, allows students to design and build boards of various kinds and later to try out the finished products for themselves. Participants got an opportunity to speak with one of professional wakeboarding’s best in Cory Teunissen during a meet-and-greet at Center Lake in Warsaw in advance of Saturday’s Supra Boats Pro Wakeboard Tour finale at the lake.

“It’s a new class that we brought into Wawasee High School. It kind of teaches the kids a little bit of construction, fabrication, and at the same time they get a physical education credit for it,” explained Wawasee HS principal Kim Nguyen of the Gone Boarding program, which began at Wawasee with a half-day, one-trimester program last school year. “Basically, it’s focused on kids designing and creating boards. They build anything from skateboards short and long, snowboards, paddle boards, wakeboards and surfers. Once they build them, they actually get to take them out and get to use them at the same time to get their PE credit.”

“They’re excited. They were really pumped,” continued Nguyen of Friday’s meeting with Teunissen. “A lot of these kids at school, most of them barely get on the water. Some of them surf and board a little bit, but to be able to come out on a Pro Wakeboard Tour boat and learn from some pros, they are beyond ecstatic.”

If Wawasee students were going to get some professional instruction, they could have done a lot worse than Teunissen.

Wakeboarding pro Cory Teunissen puts on a demonstration for media and students Friday.

The 20-year-old Australian went on to top the Pro Wakeboarding Tour standings on Saturday, using a perfect 1080, toeside double back roll and double half cab roll on his last run of the day to grab the top spot with a score of 98.33. Ahead of Saturday’s finals, Teunissen took time out of his busy schedule to talk to Wawasee students and a handful of other attendees about wakeboard design and technique, even giving demonstrations to the crowd. He began competing at the tender age of 7 and finished up his fourth year on the pro tour with Saturday’s PWT final. Teunissen fondly remembers his own experiences meeting with professional wakeboarders as a child, and he was happy to return the favor with Friday’s meet-and-greet event at Center Lake.

“This has actually been a cool experience for me, having some people actually come to the contest and actually getting to speak to them one-on-one. I do that every event, but this has been a lot cooler experience where there’s been like a big group. Talking to a big group, it was kind of nerve-wracking, actually,” he laughed.

“I remember the first pro wakeboard event that I went to in my hometown actually, believe it or not. I really fell in love with it all over again. I thought it was the coolest thing in the world. I got to meet my heroes, and the cool thing about it, they were just people like you and me. That was a big part of what pushed me so hard to get to where I am, just because I wanted that and wanted to be in that spotlight and just help everyone else or be a role model for younger people to try and get into the sport and enjoy the thing that I love so much.”

Center Lake was chosen by PWT sponsor Supra Boats as the venue for this year’s tour finale after an event last year in Indianapolis. With Indiana experiencing a surge in the popularity of wakeboarding and other watersports and with Supra Boats dealer Pro Wake Watersports located nearby, the lake seemed like a natural fit for Saturday’s event.

“We work with Supra to choose the venues, and they have a very active, awesome dealer here in the area, Pro Wake Watersports,” explained PWT representative Jessica Kirchner. “So they wanted to kind of kiss the dealer and bring this event here because they’re a great client, and they sell a ton of boats. Supra Boats is a brand that is used by a lot of wakeboarders here in the area. They kind of try to go to areas where they’re trying to get the word out and do some more branding for their products.”

And with Center Lake hosting the finals, it was a perfect opportunity for Wawasee’s Gone Boarding students to showcase their work and receive pointers from the pros.

The Gone Boarding program was developed by teachers hoping to engage students who were slipping through the cracks of the educational system, and its curriculum encompasses math and the arts, along with science, engineering, business and an optional physical education component, where students can learn to actually use the boards they design and build. Since its implementation at Wawasee last year, the program has ballooned from 20 participants to a full 50 with a wait list of another 100 students and from a single trimester session to sessions in each of the high school’s three trimesters.

“Anything we can do to engage kids in learning is a bonus for schools. A lot of times kids these days, they go through a lot of academic courses, and they get a little bored,” Nguyen said. “They need to move around and be a little active so taking something that they’re passionate about and then basically putting it into a curriculum and creating a class for it, the thought of it is exciting to kids, let alone taking the class itself.”

Wawasee grad Hannah-Marie Lamle tries her hand at wakeboarding at Center Lake.