By Jack Burden

Welcome to the water ski multiverse. We now live in a sport where everything is happening everywhere, all at once.

Many will ask whether a tiny, fractured niche sport really needed a third professional tour. Whether further splitting an already bloated and incoherent global calendar is remotely helpful. Whether everyone couldn’t just sit down, act like adults, and pull in the same direction for once.

But like it or not, the future is here. And for many pro skiers, it’s spelled N-A-U-T-I-Q-U-E.

For years, Nautique has been the lifeblood of elite skiing. They held the IWWF towboat contract for a decade—pouring hundreds of thousands of dollars into the federation. They kept the sport’s two crown jewels, the Moomba Masters and the U.S. Masters, alive through recessions, pandemics, and every imaginable governance meltdown. They’ve backed more athletes, more consistently, and more generously than anyone else.

And now, with their World Series of Water Skiing, they are injecting more money into professional skiing than all of the events on the Waterski Pro Tour and the WWS Overall Tour combined. It is the single largest investment in pro skiing in over twenty years.

Some in the sport cheered. Others felt the move like a bottle thrown across a quiet bar.

Because this is happening in a sport already stretched to breaking point. A sport where infighting and turf battles drain whatever oxygen remained. A sport that can’t agree on what its professional product is—let alone how to sell it.

The truth is that pro events have been propped up by private pockets, passion projects, and a politely disguised wealth-redistribution scheme in which the entry fees of lower-ranked skiers become prize money for the best. Everyone knows this. Everyone pretends not to.

In 2025, only ten skiers earned enough prize money to rise above the U.S. food-stamp line. Only five beat a full-time minimum-wage worker in Florida. That’s the economic reality behind the illusion of professionalism.

The Waterski Pro Tour was supposed to fix that. When it launched in 2021, it felt like a correction years overdue: athlete-led, narrative-driven, and structured enough to make sense of a notoriously incoherent landscape. For a moment, it worked. A wave of new events emerged. Those events gained legitimacy simply by being part of something bigger. Fans had a story to follow. Athletes had a season to chase.

But momentum disguised rot. The number of events rose, but prize money didn’t. More events meant less industry engagement, as limited marketing budgets were stretched thin. More weekends meant athletes couldn’t keep up. If you can’t make a living skiing—and you can’t—you need a day job. If you need a day job, you can’t chase tournaments across continents.

What emerged was a fractured field where some of the sport’s biggest names—Nate Smith, Regina Jaquess, Erika Lang—competed sparingly, their absences eroding the Pro Tour’s ability to crown a meaningful champion.

The Pro Tour needed substance, sponsors, and structure. What it had was a veneer: a brand lacquered over twenty-odd independent events, no real control over any of them, and no unified commercial product to sell.

Nautique is a company built on consolidation and control. It was never sold on the Pro Tour. They declined to include their flagship events from the outset and slowly leaned on the other events they sponsored to pull out one by one.

And so the World Series arrived. Without the IWWF towboat contract, Nautique needed a new platform to showcase their product—and suddenly had the budget to build it.

If the launch feels like a declaration of war, maybe it is. But history says progress rarely arrives without stepping on someone’s toes. In 1984, the Coors Light Water Ski Tour was born into a similarly scattered landscape. Over the prior decade, volunteers had pieced together a loose constellation of pro events across the United States. Then MasterCraft’s CEO launched an organized, centralized Tour. The American Water Ski Association fought it. They even tried to create a rival Tour in response. Some existing events joined the new Tour; others stayed outside and slowly faded.

We speak about that era with reverence now, but it was never universally adored. Long-running events went bankrupt under its competitive shadow. The Masters was dragged into professionalism kicking and screaming. Governing bodies resented losing control. And twice in the 1990s, athletes built rival tours out of frustration.

Yet through that conflict, skiing soared. The bull-in-a-china-shop approach taken by Rob Shirley and his successors put the sport on the map.

The parallels to Nautique’s move are almost uncomfortable. A single manufacturer launching a well-funded circuit. Independent events overshadowed. A governing body uneasy about losing control. A sport caught between centralization and chaos.

The significance of Nautique’s new tour isn’t the number of events. It’s the caliber. Five stops with genuinely deep prize pools and the full weight of Nautique’s athlete roster behind them will dominate the season. These will be the strongest fields, the highest stakes, the tournaments with consequences. That’s a new center of mass in a small universe. The kind of gravity that rewrites every orbit.

And for the Waterski Pro Tour, it means being nudged toward the cold edge of the map. Signs of strain have already surfaced: burnout among leadership, stalled content, a shrinking calendar. A schedule that risks becoming a regional slalom series, not a global showcase. Losing the sport’s most important events doesn’t kill the Pro Tour, but it guts its claim to legitimacy.

None of this means Nautique’s series is a revolution. Four of its five events already existed and were already among the sport’s highest-purse stops. The real change is the branding, the consolidation, and the clarity of intent. Nautique has given a name—and a narrative spine—to the shadow circuit they’ve been running for half a decade.

The danger isn’t Nautique doing this. It’s the sport doing nothing else.

Because adding more events with prize purses that barely cover travel isn’t a strategy. It’s noise. Nautique wants fewer, bigger, richer. Quality over quantity.

Well, that’s not exactly true either. Nautique’s goal is simple: sell boats. They believe the best path to that is a closed circuit they control—one built around their pros, aspirational juniors, and even a revived Big Dawg series.

Time will tell how long the sport can survive with three competing tours. Whether the Waterski Pro Tour can stage a comeback. Whether Nautique’s World Series can capture fans’ imagination. Where the WWS Overall Tour fits in any of this.

But this is the part where someone usually promises that competition breeds innovation, that conflict is healthy, that chaos is just the prelude to clarity. Maybe. But it’s just as possible we’re watching the sport split into its separate realities for good—each with its own logic, its own loyalties, its own gravitational pull.

Nautique has drawn its line. The Pro Tour is wobbling on its axis. The rest of the sport is left choosing which version of the future it wants to believe in.

That’s the multiverse we live in now.
And like any multiverse, only one timeline survives.

By Jack Burden

On a flawless summer morning, with water so flat it blurs the line between lake and sky, some of the world’s best slalom skiers wait their turn. They stretch, limber up, and ready themselves to launch down a course they know as intimately as their own signatures. The cameras roll. The engine’s roar cuts clean through the still air. From a distance, professional water skiing appears unshaken.

But beneath the polish, the sport stands once again on uncertain footing.

Fractured tours, softening prize purses, splintered sponsorships—and a question as old as the slalom course itself: who, exactly, is steering water skiing’s future?

This winter, as tournament schedules for another pro season locked into place, Nautique—the boat manufacturer as synonymous with waterskiing as Wilson is with tennis—quietly severed its final ties with the Waterski Pro Tour for 2025. On paper, it was a footnote. In practice, it was an earthquake.

This is the equivalent of Wimbledon quietly pulling out of the ATP Tour. Or if Augusta told the PGA: We’re good on our own this year, thanks.

Since its inception in 2021, the Pro Tour has been professional skiing’s most unifying force. Born out of pandemic-era recalibration, it bundled previously disconnected events into a coherent narrative, raising prize purses and driving a resurgence of fan interest. It created a season-long arc, elevating once-forgotten stops into destination tournaments. And for a few glorious seasons, the fractured sport of competitive skiing looked, briefly, like a professional tour again.

Nautique’s quiet exit cracks that illusion.

The writing, truthfully, has been on the wall for some time. Nautique is the primary sponsor of water skiing’s two longest-running and highest-paying events—the Moomba Masters and the U.S. Masters—both widely regarded as the sport’s equivalent of Majors. Nautique also serves as the primary organizer of the latter tournament. After its inclusion in the Pro Tour’s inaugural season in 2021, Nautique pulled the Masters out of the Tour. Then, when Moomba returned post-COVID in 2022, they too declined to participate.

A third blow came when the Botaski ProAm, a newer but increasingly important event, stepped away in 2023 after a single season of Pro Tour involvement. Another Nautique-sponsored event, Botaski’s withdrawal reinforced a trend.

Now in 2025, after four seasons as a fixture on the Pro Tour, the California ProAm will join the ranks of the two majors and Botaski on the sidelines. And just like that, the longest-running event on the Pro Tour is relegated to a sideshow—no longer relevant to any season-long narrative, unless one considers qualifying for the U.S. Masters to be the be-all and end-all of the water ski season.

Their reasoning? Officially muted. Representatives from Nautique Boats declined requests for an interview for this article.

It’s difficult—even when granting Nautique every benefit of the doubt—to formulate a coherent rationale for their aversion to the Pro Tour. Let’s be clear: it costs nothing for an event to be included on the Waterski Pro Tour. The perks are numerous—pre- and post-event marketing, social media exposure, highlight packages, and, most importantly, inclusion in an absorbing season-long narrative that gives any result the potential for broader ramifications.

Sure, there’s a reasonable argument for the majors to stay independent. They have the history, they have the brand. Arguably, the Masters’ decision to remain separate from the fledgling Coors Light Water Ski Tour in the 1980s saved it from the fate of other legacy tournaments like the California International Cup and the Tournament of Champions—both subsumed into the Tour brand and ultimately victims of the organization’s financial woes.

But the Waterski Pro Tour is just that: a brand name. It doesn’t take over existing tournaments. It supports them. It adds value. It’s hard to see how a tournament like the Botaski ProAm—begun as a small, men’s-only slalom event in 2018 and since expanded to include women and, more recently, tricks—has a brand strong enough to stand entirely apart. Surely the season-long narrative and visibility the Pro Tour brings is a value-add, not a liability.

The closest thing to a justification is a vision, hinted at publicly by Nautique insider Matt Rini during last year’s California ProAm: the idea of a Nautique-backed international circuit.

“Nautique is all about three-event—building a three-event boat,” he said. “The goal is to have four [tournaments], each featuring all three events, in a season. There’s no jump at Botaski, but they want to add it there. And they want tricks here [in California]. That would be amazing.”

That vision has been echoed before by Brian Sullivan, Nautique’s VP of Marketing, who once described the company’s ambition as “wanting to keep doing bigger and better events, to keep growing the sport—that’s one of our main goals.”

But even that ambition raises questions—chief among them, whether a parallel circuit run by a single manufacturer can truly grow the sport, or simply divide it further.

Nautique’s recent maneuvers, however, haven’t occurred in a vacuum. Taken alongside a string of recent controversies, they appear less like isolated strategic pivots and more like part of a broader pattern: control, consolidation, and increasingly contentious relations with athletes.

In recent years, the company has faced criticism for its rigid gatekeeping of the Masters — from Byzantine qualification procedures to the banning of a world champion for alleged unsportsmanlike conduct — as well as the contentious dismissals of top athletes like Jonathan Travers, Jacinta Carroll, and Patricio Font, raising concerns about its approach to athlete management.

Seen in that light, Nautique’s retreat from the Pro Tour looks less like a routine reshuffle and more like a tightening grip on the sport’s levers of power.

If so, they are not the first to try.

Competing pro tours have been attempted before in water skiing. Rarely with much success. In 1987, the American Water Ski Association launched the short-lived U.S. Grand Prix of Water Skiing to compete with the Coors Light Water Ski Tour. Then again, more dramatically, in 1990, Camille Duvall and a cadre of frustrated skiers attempted a coup. They launched an upstart circuit promising more prize money, athlete control, and safer skiing conditions.

For one turbulent season, skiing had two competing tours: the rebel PAWS circuit and the establishment Michelob Dry Tour. Sherri Slone famously won two pro jump titles on the same day.

The experiment imploded. Both tours crumbled under legal battles, sponsor fatigue, and logistical overload. By 1991, PAWS was gone. The old tour limped along, wounded but intact. The sport never fully recovered its eighties-era swagger.

Today, no one has openly declared “war” like Duvall once did. But Nautique’s move—alongside an already splintered calendar featuring the WWS Overall Tour and standalone events—feels eerily like history tightening its rope again.

On paper, these should be boom times. Each of the past three seasons has brought the highest prize purses in over 15 years. The gender pay gap has shrunk dramatically, from 60 cents on the dollar to near parity. The Waterski Broadcasting Company streams nearly every pro event, in crisp HD, for free. Fans can sit in their living rooms and watch the world’s best almost every weekend.

But peel back the webcast polish and cracks show.

The Swiss Pro Slalom—the sport’s most-watched webcast annually—has just been demoted from the Pro Tour after failing to secure adequate sponsorship. Jumping, once the marquee discipline of water skiing, has seen prize money slashed by more than half in the last decade. Even trick skiing, despite a recent resurgence on the water, still lags far behind its 2000s heyday in financial support.

For the first time since 2020, when the global pandemic shuttered nearly all events, professional prize purses are forecast to decline in 2025.

Even Nate Smith, the most dominant slalom skier of his generation, has quietly taken on a “real job” in recent years to stay afloat. Coaching gigs and benevolent parents remain as crucial as gate setups at 41 off.

It begs the question: can the sport really sustain another professional circuit? Can a niche sport like water skiing afford this level of fragmentation?

The cameras are still rolling. The rope still hangs off the pylon. The skiers will ski. And for now, the sport holds together—if just barely.

But history in this sport doesn’t repeat itself quietly. Every time water skiing has splintered before, it’s taken years to recover. Some fractures have never fully healed.

Now, both sides risk losing something vital.

Nautique’s events—the crown jewels of professional skiing—draw their power from prestige, history, and the feeling that they are the center of the sport’s universe. Walling them off too far from the broader narrative risks dulling their shine, turning majors into outliers.

At the same time, the Pro Tour loses critical legitimacy without the weight of the sport’s longest-standing events on its calendar. Fans, athletes, and sponsors are left navigating a fragmented landscape—unsure which path truly leads to the sport’s future.

The truth is, no one wins a fractured season.

Not Nautique. Not the Tour. Not the athletes. Not the fans.

If the sport is to move forward, it needs everyone—manufacturers, organizers, and athletes—rowing in the same direction again.

There’s still time to course-correct.

Hopefully, someone picks up the rope.