Rocking the boat: Brown qualifies for wakeboard world finals

By Gabriel Garcia
Daily Times Correspondent
www.thedailytimes.com

For Maryville resident and Skier's Choice Inc. product manager Matt Brown, profession and hobby are inseparable. In fact, one could say they're related. Intertwined, even. Perhaps, almost one and the same. Right down to the cases of upward mobility in both his profession and hobby.
In seven years with the Maryville-based manufacturer of wakeboard and waterski towboats, the 32-year-old Brown has advanced from product engineer to product manager of the company's Moomba and Supra lines of boats.

Matt Brown, a product manager at Skier's Choice in Maryville, will compete for a world championship next month in a wakeboarding competition.

And Brown's progression in the sport of wakeboarding — a hobby he first took up as a college sophomore at Tennessee Tech — took another leap forward in the week of June 20-24 when he qualified for the 2007 World Wakeboard Association World Championships. Brown qualified for the World Championships during that week by placing seventh in the WWA Wakeboard National Championships at Kenosha, Wis. “It was kind of a joke at first,” Brown said. “I was saying that I was going to qualify for the worlds. Some people took me seriously, and some didn't, and I made it.” And when Brown takes to the waters for the World Championship at Sparks Marina in Sparks, Nev., during the week of August 23-26, he will be pulled by a boat of his very own design. With Skier's Choice as a sponsor of the World Championships in 2007, the same Supra boats designed under Brown's supervision will tow all competitors — hailing from Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Japan and many other countries — in the event, including Brown himself. “It's kind of a cool deal because I get to wakeboard as my hobby, and then I'm actually head of all design, also,” he said. “I get to design boats that I use for my hobby. It's like the ultimate job.”

And as Brown attempts to capture the World Championship in the Men's Amateur Masters' division (ages 30-35), he will ride and twirl across the lake with his nearly 1-year-old son, Benji, in mind. After all, it's the very thought of Benji that motivated Brown to advance to the top in both profession and hobby in the first place.
“The big drive was to, when he (Benji) gets older, say that I did this — that I qualified for the worlds; that I got to ride behind a boat I designed,” Brown said. And because the 2007 sponsorship fell to Skier's Choice, Brown couldn't let that opportunity pass him by.
“I started practicing again hard and heavy trying to qualify in nationals so I could make it to worlds,” Brown said.
And it is Benji who often catches the breeze over Tellico Lake, next to which Matt and his wife, Anita, have a home. A wakeboard tugboat is always in the water next to their home. Moreover, at least four evenings a week, Matt practices new tricks and keeps his form consistent while Anita, who used to wakeboard herself, and Benji ride along.

And the road to the apogee of professional, recreational and family life began when Brown, still a college student with a few waterskiing friends, first saw a wakeboarder skirt across the lake in 1993 and thought, “I've got to get one of those.” The summer following, Brown caught the wakeboarding events at the X Games on television and fell in love with the sport. He practiced his wakeboarding while working his way to a mechanical engineering degree from Tennessee Tech.
After graduating in 1998, Brown took a job at the Federal-Mogul branch in Sparta as a product engineer while still residing in Cookeville. Brown happened to live in the same apartment building as a couple who had bought a brand new ski boat and kept up on his wakeboarding.

In the meantime, Brown competed in the International Amateur Waterski, Wakeboard, Wakeskate and Kneeboard Tour events around Cookeville, as well as the occasional event in surrounding Southeastern states. It wasn't just for fun, either. “I was also really trying to network and find people in the industry in which I wanted to be, within the marine industry,” Brown said. “I got to know more people, and I started driving at different events, judging different events.”
His networking efforts paid off. In 2000, Brown got a job with Skier's Choice and moved to Maryville.

“Once I got there, I got to wakeboard a whole lot more,” he said. Brown, who also reached the Nationals in 2005, occasionally even gets to ride on the wakeboard as part of his job to make sure his latest boat designs work. “I love my job, and I'm in the position where I'm competing as a half-hobby, half-supporting what I do,” he said. “It also gives me a huge advantage in my job because being into the sport so heavy, it gives me an insider's edge into exactly what the consumers are looking for.
“To plug the company side of what I do, about me being a competitor, being a world competitor, being one of the premier riders in my age division, I know exactly what people are looking for, so it helps the design side of my job.”
And thus, hobby and profession are one and the same.