Benefits of Club Membership...

     -Organized club activities, events and play days. BBQ’s, private lake time, Christmas party, winter outings.

     -Meet new people and make new friends.

     -Calendar of events for yearly activities.

     -Become a better skier/boarder through coaching, and more time on the water.

     -Not necessary to own a boat; yet still be able to get out and water ski and wakeboard with friends.

     -Learn new areas to boat and wakeboard and familiarity with areas through joint outings.

     -Having the option of being in a national organization (OWSA) and in a local club, organization, independently.

     -Opportunity to gain knowledge of water skiing and wake boarding through club meetings, events and speakers.

     -Obtaining a feeling of "Belonging" of common bond experience.

     -Promote and understand safe power boating and water sport activities.

     -To protect and preserve the rights and freedoms to enjoy the sport of water skiing and wake boarding.

     -To help preserve and promote our natural resources.

     -The ability to enjoy boating activities as a family and at a price reasonable for doing so.

     -Helping to discourage bad boating practices.

     -Assistance in formulating and conducting youth driver education clinics.

     -Serve as a catalyst in service to state and federal agencies in providing new boating, skiing and wakeboarding areas and parking facilities.

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SUNDANCE WATER SPORTS CLUB HISTORY   

ESTABLISHED:   1981 as the SUNDANCE TOURNAMENT SKI CLUB

The club was instigated by the owner of a small local ski shop. His equipment representative had experience with ski clubs and the American Water Ski Association, AWSA. She assisted in how to set up a club. From there he set up the initial meeting which brought together the founding members.

Originally, the newly formed club members got together and loaned the club the money to purchase and install a water ski course. The original plan was to set up the slalom course at Haystack Reservoir. However, that particular year, Haystack was too low to support this. By default the course was originally installed on the Crooked River arm of Lake Billy Chinook just downstream of its current location about _ mile south in the shallow area on the west side of the river. (just below the group camp ground) This location sort of worked for practice but was too open to the rest of the lake and not conducive to sponsoring a ski tournament. The ski course was later relocated and installed at Haystack Reservoir. This location worked much better for both practice and putting on water ski tournaments.

In the first years of putting on these tournaments, several interesting things happened. To begin with, it was every local Central Oregonians first experience with a slalom course. This proved to be very humbling and began to separate the truly dedicated water skiers from the weekend “hot dogs”.

Secondly, not really knowing what we were doing, we had practice in the morning. (every entrant got the opportunity to practice) with the tournament in the afternoon. This later evolved into two round best-score tournaments. With this approach we surprised our AWSA counterparts in the Willamette Valley by drawing large crowds and being very efficient in running our tournaments. They soon followed with the multi-round set up and began catering to the higher numbered novice level entrant.

During the years at Haystack, we also partnered with the Emerald Valley Ski Club (out of Eugene) and Crescent Lake Resort to co-sponsor tournaments at Crescent Lake. The first year at Crescent Lake, we pulled the ski course out of Haystack the weekend before the tournament, installed it at Crescent Lake and then reinstalled it back to Haystack. In later years, we borrowed a member’s personal ski course which was already installed at Crescent Lake. One year when only three of us showed up to move the ski course we towed it across the lake. This took a lot of time but worked better than pulling out and moving the course from Haystack.

The Crescent Lake tournaments were soon talked about all over the state. On Saturday, we pulled practice, put on a ski show, and had a live band and BBQ on the beach. The full two-round tournament was on Sunday. After a couple of years, the ownership of the resort changed hands. That along with the wind on Crescent Lake soon ended these tournaments.

It didn’t take long for the weekend crowds and open lake at Haystack to force the club to move the slalom course to the current more controlled location near the Crooked River Bridge on Lake Billy Chinook.