The Rookies

I want to start this blog of with a small explanation. I've had a few people reach out to me with the question how to follow my blog. It is possible to fill in your e-mail address where it says 'follow by e-mail'. When you do this, you will get an e-mail notification when I post my blog. However, you can only find 'follow by e-mail' on the desktop version. So either this has to be done on a computer, or you scroll down to the end of the page on the mobile version and click on 'desktop version'  to find it. I hope this helps!


Now on to the blog. Last week I explained how training with a few people my age helped me discover my sport. Even though we had quite similar levels at one point, which motivated all of us to train to the best of our abilities, there was nothing more motivating to see people much better than me. Luckily, with our trainers, we went to rookie competitions. Since water-skiing is such a small sport in the Netherlands, it was no problem to organize a rookie competition as part of Nationals. These competitions were great to get some experience in dealing with stress and some insights on how everything was organized at the competitions. They were also good to meet more people that had about the same level in skiing, because this motivated in the short term. It was necessary to keep growing and the results were instant, because I won my first tournament. Even though it was not an official tournament and the results were absolutely not qualified for ranking list, it meant a lot to me. My first competition was quite some time ago and the scores didn't really matter, so I remember the feelings it gave me, but not the scores I skied. The results are also not published because the rookies are not official competitions. If I had to make an educated guess I'd say that I got 10 points for tricks for doing something that might have looked like a sideslide. Then seeing the skiers competing at nationals getting around 3000 points, I was really impressed. I also realized that what we did in our training was still far away from the real competition skiing, but that was something to work on. The rookie tournaments didn't follow all the rules, but it was already stricter than in training. This way we were slowly introduced to all the rules, but we were allowed to fall once, which took the pressure off. This way it was easier to grow into the real tournaments (after lots of training of course). I competed in my first national championship in 2014. It is a lot of fun to be able to ski with people that you grew up looking up to.

Looking up to other skiers has been the best motivation for me throughout the years. Competing as a rookie meant I could meet the best skiers of our country. This is where I first met Pemm and Tycho for example, who I went to Europeans with last year! I learned that they were skiing for our national team. This was the first time I realised how much more there was to do before I really counted in the water-skiing sport. I made it another goal to be able to join the Dutch team, even though I had no idea how, I would die trying.

Now I've been saying that the Europeans in Rome were my first, but that is not completely correct. It was the first time I was able to ski at a European championship, but together with my training buddies we had visited the Europeans in Maurik, held in 2012. Since we'd already met the Dutch skiers at other competitions, they were able to introduce us to some of the international skiers. I still remember being here, even though it was almost 4 years ago, as a game changing moment. When I was in Maurik trying to talk to everyone in their native language and watching everyone ski was the moment I knew that this was my goal. I would not stop training as hard as I possibly can until I could join the Dutch team and be one of the skiers at the Europeans.