World champion: Teen finds her place on wakeboard

Emylee Wright remembers being unconscious in the water, with some part of her brain still alert enough to hear the rescue boat puttering toward her after she was knocked silly missing a wakeboard jump.

"It was really weird," Wright recalled. "It was the weirdest thing ever. I vaguely remember that noise. It was just really slow bubbling noises."

The boat pulled up beside Wright and hauled her body onboard.

Still dazed, Wright took a moment to survey her surroundings.

Her hair was dripping wet from being in the water, she was wearing her wetsuit and still had a wakeboard attached to her feet.

Wright paused, then posed a question to the group peering down at her.

"Did I ride today?" she asked.

These moments are just part of the price of wakeboarding.

Concussions are so common that, when asked what injuries she has suffered as a wakeboarder, Wright mentioned just two ankle injuries.

"Well, concussions are a big one, but they're kind of normal," Wright said. "You don't freak out as much after the first one. I've been knocked out more than once."

But she's gotten back up. Every time.

And after six years of honing her slightly unusual craft, Wright — a 16-year-old student at Statesville Christian — has a lot more to show for it than just bumps and bruises.

Like a world championship.

Wright finished third place at the World Wakeboard Association Junior Women's National championship earlier this year.

That qualified her for the world championship event, which she won easily.

"It's really hard to grasp," Wright said. "I've always been looking and saying, 'Oh, I want this to be me.' Now it is me, and I can't really wrap my mind around it."

Wright earned a score of 70.33 points from a panel of judges during her world championship run.
No one else even broke 60 on the 100-point scale used to determine the winner.

The second-place finisher was awarded 57.33 points for her performance, far, far behind Wright.
Wakeboarding is a somewhat new sport, but steadily gaining in popularity among the current generation of athletes.

Connected via tether to the back of a boat, much like water skiing, contestants are pulled along in the water for a predetermined length.

Then the boat turns around and comes back to the start.

This is called a run, and all riders perform jumps, flips, turns and grabs from their wakeboard, which is shaped like a snowboard.

The riskier the trick, the higher the potential points.

"I had what I wanted to do in my head," Wright said of her championship run. "The week before, all I did was go out and do my run, then come back inside. I knew what I wanted to do."

Wright also knew what she wanted to do when she was 10 years old and saw a wakeboarding picture on the back of an Overton's magazine.

On Christmas morning that year, a board was waiting for her behind the Christmas tree.
"I saw that picture and wanted to do it," Wright said. "It was just to do something different, something adventurous."

Before wakeboarding, Wright was an avid gymnast.

She practiced for 30 hours a week for several years, an experience that has been incredibly valuable to her wakeboarding career — she landed her first flip with her eyes closed and never freaks out while taking flight.

"That actually surprised a lot of people," Wright said with a chuckle. "But after doing gymnastics, your air awareness is amazing."

After a successful two-year span doing tournaments all summer, Wright is teetering on the line between amateur wakeboarder and professional.

When the season starts again in March, Wright wants to compete exclusively on the professional circuit and one day be known as the pre-eminent female boarder.

And when she wants something, she usually puts in the work to get it.

"You have to train three or four days a week," said Todd Wright, Emylee's father. "There's no way around it. She's out practicing probably six to eight hours a week. She's put in the work and has come so far. She's earned everything."