Alumni
Teamwork
Volleyball player Savanna Shumaker ’07 wows crowds during summer performances with a championship water ski show team.
By Dan Shalin
Savanna Shumaker ’07 has been a valuable member of the women’s volleyball squad for two seasons, but head coach Beth Pier gained a new respect for the junior over the summer. That’s when Pier made her first trip to Twin Lakes, Wisconsin, to watch Shumaker perform with her other teammates, the Aquanuts.
The group is an award-winning water ski team that puts on shows and competes from May to September each year. Shumaker is in her fourth season with the squad and her participation may be aiding her on the volleyball court. “It’s pretty amazing what they can do,” Pier says. “It takes balance and strength. Now I know why Savanna’s legs are so strong.”
This past summer, Shumaker appeared in two scenes in the Aquanut’s show, which had a 1970s car wash theme: she was part of a 25-girl ballet line on water and sat on the shoulders of a man on skis. In the past, she has been on the second tier of a four-tier pyramid; the boys make up the first tier, while the younger girls occupy the top levels.
The 65-person, all-ages troop performs twice a week all summer and competed in two major competitions in 2005, the Wisconsin State Championships (the biggest show ski tournament in the world) and the National Championships in Janesville. The Aquanuts finished second in both.
Shumaker, a native of Bristol, Wisconsin, is no stranger to such success. Last fall season, she appeared in every match for the Foresters volleyball team that went 20–13 and finished second in the Midwest Conference. The team won the conference the previous year. In April, Pier chose Shumaker as the volleyball team’s recipient of the Athletic Council Sportsmanship Award.
“Savanna goes about her business and doesn’t worry about petty things that other people worry about. She doesn’t complain and has a great attitude,” says Pier. “The thing I like most about Savanna is that she doesn’t have to ask for directions and doesn’t need to have somebody else pushing her. Also, she just understands the whole team concept very well.”
Teamwork is obviously a key element in both of Shumaker’s chosen sports. “In volleyball you have six players and you need to work together and communicate in order for the team to work,” says the dual math and business major. “Also, everybody must go out and make sacrifices. With the water ski team, there are 65 people with their own opinions about how things should be done. There has to be a give-and-take.”
Shumaker also sees parallels in the way her teams, on the court and the water, develop during a season: starting slow, coming together, and eventually hitting their stride when it counts the most. “In volleyball we always start a little rusty because we haven’t played in a year and we have new freshmen coming in,” she says. “But we work around each other and toward the end, we get better and better.”
The Aquanuts hold dry land practices throughout the fall and winter, choreographing shows in a gymnasium and then working on pyramids and other formations. Sometimes, rehearsals are held at a local firehouse and ropes are extended behind a stationary truck. The team moves to Lake Mary in Twin Lakes in May. Early-season shows can be full of falls, and the group is often far from polished when the first tournament rolls around in June. “This year, though, we had a really good year,” Shumaker says. “As soon as we were out on the water, we were awesome. We had prepared so much over the winter.”
The team takes competitions seriously and practices switch from every other Sunday to nearly every day leading up to nationals. But for most of the summer, the Aquanuts are simply about entertainment. “When the national tournament rolls around for skiing, we practice twice as hard. So, in that aspect it’s the same as volleyball because you are in competition mode,” Shumaker says. “We compete three times a year, but that’s not the main purpose of the ski team. Really, we are just a bunch of hams and we like to be in front of a crowd and dance and smile.”
Dan Shalin is an Evanston-based sports writer.