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SASKATOONEXPRESS - August 7-13, 2017 - Page 1
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Volume 16, Issue 31, Week of August 7, 2017
Dalmeny water-skier taking over the waves Ashley Baerg exhibits her trick-skiing skills at the 2015 World Championships in Elk Grove, California. (Photo Supplied.) Cam Hutchinson Saskatoon Express t the end of a Canadian national team basketball camp in Alabama, the players were asked if they wanted to go water-skiing as part of a windup event. Ashley Baerg of Dalmeny was one of those who quickly decided to give it a go. She always loved being at the lake with family and had done a fair amount of tubing over the years. That water-skiing outing was in 2012. Eleven months later she was competing at the 2013 Disabled World Water Ski championships and four years after that she holds a world record. She set the record this spring in Australia. Baerg was oh-so-close to competing on
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Canada’s basketball team at the 2012 Summer Paralympic Games in London. Baerg was an alternate on the team and didn’t go to the Games. She was smitten with water-skiing that day in Alabama, although she saw herself as a basketball player who would ski recreationally. “I called my parents from Alabama and said we need to figure out how I can get a ski to take to the lake in the summer. Tubing was getting a little harder on my body; I just couldn’t handle it anymore.” Baerg was born with spina bifida and sits to ski. After returning from Alabama she was told to contact Dave Wassill to get a ski. She was told Wassill was going to be pushy and would want her to compete. “I was, ‘No, no, my goal was to make
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the national team for basketball.’ I hadn’t quite done that yet, but that was my goal.” Baerg planned to work hard to be on the team when the 2016 Games rolled around in Rio. Wassill remembers meeting Baerg and her wanting that ski. “I said, ‘Well, there is more to it than that.’ She said, ‘No there isn’t, just get me a ski.’ So we got her a ski, she came back a weekend after and said, ‘Yeah, I’ll take a lesson.’” Baerg likely said it more politely than that, but that was the start of a successful relationship between a coach and an athlete. “She is a phenomenal athlete,” said Wassill, who has been involved in local water-skiing for more than 40 years. “She can apply her physical skills quickly to
anything new.” It didn’t take long for Baerg to start falling in love with the sport. Wassill took her to Florida for a week for a prospect training camp not long after she started skiing. People were in Florida to prepare for the 2013 world championships in Italy. “Inside I was so jealous because I was like, ‘Man, Italy is on my bucket list and I’m never going to make the team.’ I had been trying for 10 years to make a basketball national team. About three days into that camp, they invited me to Italy. So I was on the team. “It was pretty surreal, just knowing I had tried so hard to make the national team for basketball and then so quick for waterskiing.” (Continued on page 12)
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