Tens of thousands of memories, hundreds and hundreds of lives.  Imagine if you will being a teenage boy or girl, without a huge variety of experiences.  That's a really tough time in one's life, fitting in, being good enough, being cool.  We've taken lots of young people like that who told us they weren't athletic or coordinated (parents don't EVER tell your child such things, that yuck sticks better than super glue on your child's self esteem and tears them down) and taught them to waterSki or kneeboard in an afternoon.  All of a sudden they CAN . . . and if they can waterSki what else can they do?  As Mark Turner says, waterSkiing opens doors people don't even know are there.

Our sadness at closing the door of the pond was like a wave, rising and receding, for it isn't just our family, or our ski club that were touched, it was all the others that stopped by to check us out.  There is incredible pleasure and pride in sitting alongside an able bodied person as they watch a wheelchair user transfer into a sit ski, then hold their own in kneeboard wars with able bodied men.  Talk about a life changing experience!  Neither the spectator nor the able bodied kneeboarder will ever hold anything but an equal respect for a wheelchair user in their life, no longer will they pity, ignore, or stare.  Can you imagine how Mark felt when he (120lbs) took out Jeff (240lbs) and/or Brice (160lbs)?