Colton King Inaugural Award 2017

The Colton King Award and the Inaugural Winner

Adam Koehler Awards, Committees, Midwestern Region, News, Regions

Colton KingThe Colton King Award was established this year, and created to honor the memory of Colton King, a University of Wisconsin – La Crosse water skier and team captain, who passed away in a tragic bicycle accident.

As a hard working student and competitive water skier, Colton coached his team on the water and tutored them with math homework at practice and late into the night at tournaments no matter where they traveled. Balancing work ethic, as a team, to be competitive as students and as skiers goes unnoticed, and the Colton King award intends to recognize teams who follow his example.

Colton King— Lauren Pugh

Criteria for Selection

  1. MCWSA teams that qualified and competed with a full roster at the 2016 NCWSA Nationals tournament.
  2. The highest team average GPA for the Fall 2016 semester.

The criteria for selection of the winner help recognize team achievement both on and off the water, honoring Colton’s memory.

Award

Presented by the USA Water Ski Foundation and the University of Wisconsin – La Crosse alumni the selected team will receive a $1000 scholarship fund to help reimburse the team’s NCWSA Nationals tournament expenses and the team will receive customized bibs before the Fall 2017 season in honor of Colton King.

The award was announced at Team Midwest’s Winter Conference XX in Columbus, Ohio on February 11, 2017.  During the announcement the MC of the event, Jon Bice, announced the basis for the award and read a letter from his teammate. This full announcement can be viewed in the video below. Thank you to Christy Kingsmill for providing the video, and Midwest skiers, Maureen and Quenten for previously providing the pictures of Colton King.

And the winner is….

 2016 NCWSA Nationals Banquet - The Ohio State University

The Ohio State University!

Congrats to The Ohio State University Water Ski Team on their outstanding season both on and off the water.

 

Latest posts by Adam Koehler (see all)

Adam Koehler

I am Clinical Assistant Professor at the University of Illinois Chicago. I earned my Ph.D. from the University of California, Riverside and Bachelor's and Masters from Marquette University. I skied collegiately at Marquette and in 2009 I received the NCWSA Outstanding Leader Award. I was NCWSA Operations Committee Chair for 7 years, and the NCWSA Secretary for 8 years.