Parents Unleashed 2019: Stage 3, Technical Freestyle on White Dog, Rouge River

Making the event look more hard core with a fullface. Natalie with a nice blunt  during practice.

This freestyle event was held on the White Dog wave on the Rouge. For many people, this feature felt like kind of a small feature for a Stakeout Unleashed event, but given uncertainty with water levels we needed to make sure we could fit in another event and it was a perfect wave for a technical freestyle, completely different than the Rib wave from stage one, and logistically easy since it was just upstream of the Stage 2 boater cross. The wave was easy to get set up on with a smooth face where you could basically throw all the tricks in your repertoire. I think if the goal of the event is to crown the best all-round paddler, than this wave was a perfect addition because it highlights different strengths than a more classic rowdy wave. Plus, I think that Dane was super excited to have us compete using his well thought out technical freestyle scoring system (explained below).

Phillipe Lavalle live streaming

This event proved to be a very historic moment for me. It is the first time that I have beat Leif (me-13th, Leif-14th) in a freestyle competition. Let me repeat that... I beat Leif!!!! This is the first time, but I guarantee that it won't be the last. Admittedly, Leif wasn't paddling his best, and the type of feature wasn't his favorite (kind of small). But, I did put down a solid core performance without anything too crazy- consistent with smooth execution of lots of easier tricks that I knew how to do well. I also really liked the judging format, which was new for me and really encouraged me to settle into just having fun throwing down a core performance rather than trying to get that one high scoring trick that could place me into a higher position.

The smile of just having a good time.

Below is Dane's score sheet given to the Athletes the morning of the event. The differentiation in points between the tricks are much smaller than classic ICF scoring, which makes it nice because competitors who do lots of smaller tricks can be competitive with someone who only throws one or two big tricks. Also, the judges added an overall steeze bonus to every ride (1-10) - basically how good you made the tricks look. Darby says that we made all the tricks look good, so really they should have included more of us gals in the highlight real (SEND highlight reel). But what I liked most was they added a flow multiplier (see bottom of sheet). They gave you a score on how well you moved from trick to trick and utilized the whole wave called the flow score. This score was then multiplied by your overall score to give you a final score.



I capitalized on this and made sure that I was constantly throwing tricks- and wasn't too concerned if some of them turned into poo turns. This turned out to be a pretty good strategy as you can see by the scoring of everyone's rides below. I was very consistent. I was super impressed by Darby's freestyle performance considering how little time she actually surfs waves. It's so frustrating that I had to work on clean blunts for years before they started going and Darby is like, oh yeah I tried that once before and it worked so I'll just throw one in the competition like I do them all the time. Anyway, Darby put it all out on the table and threw all her tricks in one ride and if this was a single best ride competition, she would have beat me by a few points. But alas, it was two rides count and her other rides just weren't up to snuff. I'm excited to see how she progresses if she actually starts working on her wave freestyle more regularly than just going to a competition once a year and throwing down.

Darby throws a clean in practice.

Here is a link to Seth's shit live shit talk for the event and the official results smash up video.  We again have some some pretty good live coverage with commentary of this stage, but we have yet been unable to upload it do to internet and data constraints. Below is the overall standings after Stage 2.







The best part of the day was getting these photos from Davis's daycare.  It seems that he was doing just fine without us, despite not having seen or heard our voices in 5 days.  But his grandma said that he loved watching the videos that were posted of us online and instantly recognized us in our gear.

If you came upon this blog first and are curious about the other stages, here are the links to those write-ups:

Stage 1: Big Wave Freestyle
Stage 2: Big Water Boater Cross
Stage 3: Technical Freestyle (this blog)
Stage 4: Technical Creeking Giant Slalom