Only in Wisconsin might freestyle water-skiing and free sweet corn be highlights of the same event. This past August, I found myself sitting on a bench overlooking Lake Mary, watching a national champion on a single ski launch a massive back mobius flip off a jump while I munched on my third ear of sweet corn. Or maybe my fourth. On a hot summer afternoon, nothing tastes better than free Wisconsin corn. And the kid stuck the landing.
The location is the village of Twin Lakes, Wisconsin, population 6,363. The venue is Lance Park, home of Aquanut Water Shows, the local water-ski show team. The event is TL Summer Nights, a competitive showcase featuring freestyle water-ski jumping, trick skiing, kneeboarding, and shoe skiing with, as a grand finale, the combined evening performance of the Aquanuts, the Wonder Lake Water Ski Show Team and the Muskego Waterbugs. Plus free sweet corn! All this crammed into a Friday evening and a full day on Saturday.
The backstory to TL Summer Nights is a long tale, best told by the event organizer, Danny “Dano the Mano” Amir, best known as the energetic announcer for pro-level tow-sports events and, with his girlfriend, Jayne Levy, the impresario behind Touch of the North Events (TOTN Events), which promotes TL Summer Nights and a number of other tow-sports events around the country. Amir, now all of 42 years old, first got started in tow sports as a junior Aquanut.
“I grew up in northern Illinois and learned to ski when I was 7 or 8 years old, on Eagle Lake near Kansasville, Wisconsin,” Amir recalls. “I was first exposed to show skiing when my family watched a performance of the Browns Lake Aquaducks and I was captivated by the scene. When I was 11 years old, I tried out for the Aquanuts. You had to be able to do a deepwater start on a slalom ski. Making the team was very competitive, and you started on the junior squad. When you were 14, you were eligible to advance or try out for the senior team.”
Wisconsin is the epicenter of show skiing in North America. According to Aaron Schoelzel, president of the Wisconsin Water Ski Federation, there are about 40 water-ski show teams in the state, more teams than all other states combined, and nobody really seems to know why. Schoelzel thinks that after World War II, lakefront resorts in northern Wisconsin started organizing water-ski exhibitions to entertain guests, and the complexity of these shows grew as the performers sought to compete with neighboring teams. The Tommy Bartlett Show, which combined show skiing with powerboat stunts and acrobatic stage acts, was another huge influence. Formed as a professional traveling act in 1952, the show found a permanent home on Lake Delton in Wisconsin Dells in 1953 and became an institution that fueled the development of what is today a $1.2 billion tourist industry in that community. Throughout its 67-year history, more than 30 million visitors watched one of its more than 18,700 daily shows, including, it seems, almost every resident of Wisconsin. The Tommy Bartlett Ski, Sky and Stage show closed permanently in 2020, an economic victim of the pandemic and rising waterfront property values.
The sport of competitive show skiing started in 1967 with the first Wisconsin State Water Ski Show Tournament, organized with the vision of Wisconsin Rapids native Jack Lukes at Red Sands Beach on Lake Wazeecha. The Wisconsin tournament established rules for judging show-ski competitions that are still in use today. That first tournament featured seven teams. Today the Wisconsin Championships, which attracts 30 teams and thousands of people to Lake Wazeecha, is the largest tournament of its kind in the world, and the most competitive within the sport. The Wisconsin title is considered more prestigious than the national championship.
Founded in 1972 and featuring multitime state and national champions, Aquanut Water Shows have 50 senior team skiers, 30 junior skiers, and about 40 nonskiing members who include boat drivers, a show director, and members of various committees—more than 120 people in total. Aquanut Water Shows is nonprofit, and every member pays an annual fee to be on the team. Fundraising and sponsorships add to an annual budget that tops $100,000. The team owns five specialized tow boats, two pickup boats, a ramp, and docks. Portable barges are used to stage skiers away from the show area, which is a terraced section of a city park overlooking the water. In addition to training for tournaments, show-ski teams typically perform for a local audience twice a week, forming pyramids and ballet lines, demonstrating trick skiing and jumping, all with flair that combines the circus with a Las Vegas review. The Aquanuts also host the Aquanut Adaptive Aquatics clinics program for individuals of varying disabilities, with 150 participants each summer over eight total clinic days.
This is the milieu that Amir joined when he made the Aquanuts team in 1993, an environment that combined competition and entertainment. As Amir progressed with the team, he became one of the top show trick skiers in the state, winning the Mark Black Memorial Award three times for being the outstanding trick skier.
“I graduated from high school in 2000, went to work at Munson Ski & Marine, and saved $20,000,” Amir says. “The idea was I would move to Florida and ski every day and find a way to make a living. So I moved in with my friend Erik Ruck, who is from Twin Lakes and was an Aquanut, and Parks Bonifay, who started show skiing with his parents as a baby at Cypress Gardens. Erik and Parks, of course, both became wakeboard champs and hall of famers. I burned through that 20 grand in a few months, but I skied for 700 days in a row. I aspired to show-ski professionally, but was humbled pretty quickly in the mecca of pro watersports.”
There are currently only a handful of professional ski shows in the world—Legoland Florida Resort (formerly Cypress Gardens), Sea World San Antonio and a show team in Singapore—so opportunities for show skiers are limited.
“By 2003, I was working at Performance Ski & Surf in Orlando and was interacting with skiers and boarders every day,” Amir says. “The dismissive attitude each camp had for the other really bothered me, and I tried to find ways to bring all the sides together. Bridging the gap across all aspects of towed watersports became an obsession.”
In 2005, Amir’s career took a turn when he was invited to be the announcer for the World Wake Association National Wakeboard Championships. Already starting to make a name for himself around the industry in the persona of Dano the Mano, Amir injected a new level of energy to the event, bringing a unique voice to the sport that mixed his knowledge of all tow sports with a rather hyperbolic emcee style that took cues from pro wrestling. He quit his day job in 2007 to exclusively announce tow-sports events, often commentating at more than 35 events a year. Today, he continues announcing select events—such as the Nautique Regattas, Nautique Masters Water Ski & Wakeboard Tournament and, most recently, Red Bull Wake the City—and is also a sales representative for Roswell Marine.
Stick with me. This story is gradually working its way around to TL Summer Nights. In Florida, Amir socialized with pro wakeboarders who would let him trick-ski behind their boat when they were done with a board session. As a bit of a goof, in 2005, Amir and a group of prominent riders proposed a barefoot contest for wakeboarders only that they called Feet on Fire.
“We did this in the middle of the week, and it was just these pro wakeboarders trying to barefoot and see who could go the longest,” Amir says. “Maybe 150 people showed up to watch, just friends and family. It was a party. Later that summer, I went back to Twin Lakes, connected with my buddy and show-skiing mentor, Kenny Meyer, and started Feet on Fire North, with eight Aquanuts and eight Aquanut alumni. And we did this for a few years.”
In 2015, Amir returned to the Wisconsin State Water Ski Show Tournament and was disappointed to learn that the Mark Black Memorial Award had been discontinued for lack of a sponsor.
“So I went back to Twin Lakes and partnered with Kenny’s son, Jarad, to organize an informal trick-skiing contest for 15 competitors,” Amir says. “To attract a little crowd and just for fun, we came up with the idea of free sweet corn. We gave away 150 ears of corn and raised $300 to sponsor the Mark Black award. In 2016, we came back and combined the trick-skiing contest with Feet on Fire, and we had 32 barefooters show up and more than 200 spectators, and gave away 500 ears of corn.”
Then Jayne stepped in.
“She pointed out that I was working pretty hard to organize these events but not breaking even,” Amir says. “She has a background in franchising, so she brings the business mindset and organizational skills, and I bring the ideas and relationships. We started working together, with Jayne managing the overall operations and marketing.”
Amir remained focused on finding ways to bring together different elements of the tow-sports community. In 2017, he organized a slalom contest on Lake Mary at the home of Kenny Meyer. Thirty-three athletes signed up, and 30 of them had never skied on a slalom course.
“We thought if we set out the slalom course at dusk the night before, nobody would notice, but of course, the local water patrol caught us dropping buoys,” Amir says. “We had to get a permit. So the next day, I went to see the city president, and he gave us permission on the condition that in the future we had to follow the rules.”
Thus was born the Twin Lakes CornFest, a one-day event in August 2018 at the Aquanut’s Lance Park venue that featured freestyle trick skiing and jumping, endurance barefooting, and swivel skiing—with free corn. Admission was charged, the Twin Lakes Chamber of Commerce secured a permit to sell beer, and multiple sponsors set up displays at the site. The event was a big success, and in 2019, the Twin Lakes CornFest expanded its length to two days, adding wakeboarding, long-distance jumping, and kids tow-sports competition.
The Twin Lakes CornFest competition differs from a traditional three-event tournament in that the judging is purely subjective.
“In a pro trick-skiing tournament, for example, the judging is objective,” Amir explains. “Each trick has specific points, and the skier needs to build a routine that crams as many points into each run as possible. A show trick skier is concerned only with entertaining the audience, by throwing some impressive tricks, but also by engaging with the crowd. At our event, we judge the trick, but also the style. A pro ski jumper is going only for distance. In our Ramp Master Superstar LD Jump event, we put a pin 125 feet from the ramp—an unimpressive distance for a pro jumper. The point being to see who can come closest to landing on the pin while also showing some style and showmanship that the judges consider. We level the playing field between pros, semipros and amateurs, and make it easier for those new to the sport to understand and be engaged.”
This approach seems to make the event a lot of fun for all of the competitors.
“We bring a variety of disciplines and skill levels together—pros, competitive college skiers, barefooters, wakeboarders, wakeskaters, show skiers and more—in an event that pays tribute and respect to tradition while adding a fun, new-school twist. A community-focused event like Twin Lakes CornFest, with the free all-you-can-eat corn, may draw someone in for the food, but they stay for the entertainment on the water,” Amir says.
By 2023, a three-day Twin Lakes CornFest event drew a crowd of 3,000 spectators and more than 130 competitors and featured a performance by 75 show skiers. Multiple pro athletes participated in the contests or supported with judging and on-water logistics, including pro wakeboarders Mike Dowdy and JB O’Neill, as well as pro water-skiers Jon Travers and Natallia Berdinkava and pro wakeboarder/trick skier Erika Lang. To keep the event fresh and avoid conflict with the biannual Show Ski Worlds, Dan and Jayne decided to make Twin Lakes CornFest an every-other-year deal but were persuaded by the community to host a smaller event in 2024: TL Summer Nights. Full-blown Twin Lakes CornFest will be back August 14-16, 2025.
Read Next: The History of Ski Nautique
At TL Summer Nights, the crowd and number of competitors were smaller than at TL CornFest, but there were still some impressive performances. At the top of my list is Kailey Koehler, a 28-year-old special-education teacher from East Troy, Wisconsin, who joined the Aquanuts at age 6 and went on to become a state-, national- and world-champion show skier, a national- and world-champion barefoot competitor, and the only three-time winner of the Willa Cook Award, presented to the best female performer at the National Water Ski Show Tournament. At TL Summer Nights, Koehler bested 23 entries in the barefoot competition with the longest distance of about 1.25 laps around a quarter-mile course, a run that lasted 55.28 seconds—an impressive feat considering that the choppy conditions were the same you’d find on any busy lake in the summer. The fact that she did this while barefooting backward, and that she dock-started backward, added a significant degree of difficulty. Koehler also won the head-to-head barefoot contest. Other barefooters won awards for dressed to impress, slowest speed, and best crash, which gives you an idea of the flavor of the event. Everyone is competing but also having fun. Winners were presented with refinished-wood water skis provided by industry legend Larry Meddock.
More fun: There was the Corn Cob Shoe Line—eight show skiers clad in costumes alternating an ear of corn and a stick of butter. There was Dan Emerson trying to start his barefoot run by standing on a canoe paddle. Collin Barber was crowned King of Shoes for landing a front flip on shoe skis and starting his run with a skit impersonating late celebrity painter Bob Ross. Ethan Shulda, Sarah Fiedorowicz and Dallas Hovda won Gangsters of Flight’s first-ever GOF Invitational freestyle water-ski jump competition, introducing a fresh format to the sport.
And there was corn. Wisconsin Style Barbecue used a giant portable pizza oven to roast 4,000 ears of corn, which was sourced locally through Rubber Ducky Country Market and from Reynold’s Farm. That works out to about 2.6 ears per attendee. I guess I got more than my share.
Ski-Show Team Names
A tradition among Wisconsin ski-show teams is coming up with a clever name. These are some of our favorites:
- Min-Aqua Bats of Minoqua, Wisconsin
- Webfooters of Fremont, Wisconsin
- Beaverland Must-Skis of Beaver Dam, Wisconsin
- Aquaducks of Burlington, Wisconsin
- Kwahamots of Tomahawk, Wisconsin
- Chain Skimmers of Conover, Wisconsin
- Badwater Ski-Ters of Spread Eagle, Wisconsin
