Rank
Team
1
Master Boaters
2
Who's Shore Daddy
2
Elongated Muskrats
4
Bros. B4 Hose
5
Weight! Don't grab my Mass
5
Daddy Dawson's Bolsheviks
7
Aspirations Asplashing
8
Flux Ups
8
Third World Sweatshop
8
What's Good FAM
11
Swamp Asymptotes
12
Surface Intensions
13
Boat Squad
14
DespaYEETo
15
Run Like the Winded
Summary:
The winners had a similar design when it came to us the main difference was the strategies behind the racers. They had racers who were very fast in the water and it seemed as if they were comfortable in the shoes. Across the board all groups had the same design (except the one outlier of course) which consisted of long shoes with unique flap mechanisms. The third place team utilized wakeboarding boots to maximize ankle support and also had shoes that were considerably long. They also had shoes that were very tall coming out of the water which allowed the racers to focus on going fast as opposed to merely staying on the shoes. The DDB group had cutouts in their shoes and in these cutouts they would place their feet inside, which again would help greatly with ankle support and overall control of the shoes. A couple groups used large flaps but in less quantity but most groups we noticed had lots of smaller flaps. These proved to work well as the teams I saw that had the large flaps ended up getting second to last and last. In our opinion it seemed that this year the top 10 teams it truly came down to the racing strategy/racing skills of each group. From the looks of it every group had similar designs, the rounded nose, long shoes, small flaps, and some sort of method to add ankle support. The top scoring teams all had very large and athletic racers who could easily command the shoes and make them go fast. This was a weak point with us as we had the athleticism in the racers it was just the size of the strides/applied force was not great enough to compete with some of the other teams. In addition, we found that teams that took attention to details and truly refined all parts of their shoes proved successful in doing good in the competition. Throughout all the teams in the competition we feel that the main difference lied in the racing as opposed to the engineering of the shoes as everyones shoes(well one group) had a decent chance of winning.