Rodeo's Ripple Effect

All you need is a sunny afternoon at the local playspot to get a handle on what's happening to the world of whitewater kayaking. Those paddlers who look like they're getting worked in the hole? That's what they want to be doing. What's happening is that kayaking has surged past its river-running, slalom-based roots and is morphing at hyper-speed into gymnastics on the water. For every traditional displacement-hull hardboat you see in that playspot, there will be three or four planing-hull kayaks, few longer than nine feet, many under eight. And chances are the paddlers still in "old-school" craft are mentally balancing bank accounts as they calculate when they'll buy the new toy everybody else seems to be enjoying so much.

Call it rodeo, playboating or freestyle, this movement onto the bleeding edge of technology and technique is transforming kayaking into a Generation Extreme passion. In the process, it is super-charging the psyche and economics of the sport.

According to a recent study for the Outdoor Recreation Coalition of America and the Sporting Goods Manufacturers Association: "Kayaks were the hottest paddlesports purchases in 1996 and combined with canoes totaled $99.1 million in sales." Planing-hull boats, of course, account for a relatively small percentage of this overall market. But if '96 was big for playboats, you can bet '97 was even bigger and that '98 will be bigger yet.

Like it or not, rodeo has become a bigger catalyst for kayaking than any other single development in the sport. Paddling veterans may talk about the '72 Olympics, "Deliverance," Baby Boomers and their disposable incomes. But rodeo, in the seven years since the first World Championships at Bitches, England, has spurred quantum leaps in technology, technique and public awareness of a once little-known sport. The economic impact is enormous. Today, there are more kayak manufacturers than ever making more playboats than ever paddled by more new entrants than ever. If average recreational paddlers are buying the same boats that ruled last year's rodeo circuit, they're also developing equipment quivers, further propelling the economics of boat making.

The last three to five years, "have been a really active period," says Risa Shimoda Callaway, a long-time rodeo paddler and, as founder of the National Organization of Whitewater Rodeos (NOWR), a driving force in the sport. "The birth and growth of whitewater was partly a function of Baby Boomers reaching their 20s and wanting to pursue a more independent sport. As those people reached their late 40s, they either retired into family or moved into another aspect of the sport, like touring. If rodeo hadn't happened, we would have lost those people and wouldn't have replaced any of them. And I think manufacturers realized that."

Look no farther than what's in retail for the proof. The diversity in number and type of playboats is astonishing. With names like the X (Wave Sports), 007 (Riot), 3-D (Perception), Vertigo (Dagger), Alien (Prijon), Innuendo (Noah), Jive (Necky), the Storm (Pyranha) and Beast (Savage V), you need a cheat sheet to keep up. That's just the new crop. The RPM, Fly, Kinetic, Whippet, Hammer and Fury may be year-old news, but they're still popular and prevalent in eddies nationwide.

"The number of boats available is overwhelming," says Steve Holmes, a former U.S. Whitewater Slalom Team member who started paddling three decades ago when he was 13. "I'll bet more new plastic kayak designs have come out in the last three years than in the total history of the sport. A lot of it is just hype and marketing. But a lot of it is legitimate design changes that make it possible for the recreational boater to do moves that only elite athletes could do before."

Playboating's Growth: Revolution vs. Evolution

Rodeo, the competitive aspect of playboating, has been around a good deal longer than the '91 Worlds, of course. Paddlers have been playing in boats since there were boats. Many of today's squirt-like tricks owe credit to the Snyder brothers and what they did at New Wave to make boats perform not just on top of the water but under the surface as well. Rodeos on the Payette, Clackamas and Ocoee were the nucleus of organized competition in the U.S. After the '93 Worlds at Hell Hole, which Eric Jackson won in a prototype Dagger Transition, rodeo really took off. But the biggest change, coming since 1995, is in the boats themselves.

Prijon's Hurricane, a plastic precursor to today's rad rodeo boats, demonstrated how flatter decks made vertical moves easier. The Savage Fury, an early planing hull design, took shapes to a new extreme. Today's rodeo boats are pocket rockets compared to their displacement-hull predecessors. Much of the volume is still there but it has been redistributed around the cockpit area. Planing hulls are even flatter, chines harder, decks more wing-like. Length has evaporated.

"When people ask me when I started boating, I say, `About four feet ago,'" says Holmes. A number of slalom paddlers are making the transition. Jackson and Scott Shipley come from paddling gates in big boats to throwing tricks--and winning rodeos--in little boats.

In the past two years, playboating has become synonymous with extreme athletics. At the same time, new boat designs make radical moves easier and open up playboating to a wide range of participants. Few activities provide the bang-for-the-buck workout you get thrashing around in a hole for an hour or two. Playboating also holds appeal because it's quick, convenient, relatively safe and enormously satisfying physically. "It's the direct equivalent of going to the gym and working out," says James Regan of Alplenglow Mountain Sport in Golden, Colo. "In an hour, you can get the same workout as eight hours on a Class II-III river. It's paddling for the attention deficit disorder generation--instant gratification."

Not all of kayaking's freshman class are ADD survivors, but they do represent a new generation and style of boaters. They range from high-school age to mid-30s, they're typically unmarried or DINKs (double income, no kids) and have plenty of disposable income. They are the "aggros"--aggressive, intense and committed to extreme fun. It's these participants whom the market is driving--and who are driving the market. "The marketing efforts we're engaged in now are directed totally toward marketshare and growth--to people who don't know about the sport but who know they want to have fun," says Chan Zwanzig, owner of Wave Sports, the Steamboat Springs, Colo.-based kayak manufacturer that's riding high on the rodeo wave. "Right now, the whitewater market is 100,000 people. We're marketing to 30 million people who don't paddle. We're marketing to people who skate, slide or ride."

Dan Gavere, a video producer who currently paddles for Wave Sports' rodeo team, is the archetype for today's new generation of paddlers, says Callaway. "There came on the scene, with the advent of Dan Gavere in 1992, a really young, very skilled person," she says. "Dan was first person I met who had a paddling résumé. It showed he was intent on being involved in the industry and serious enough to write one of those things." But there is a darker side to the rodeo paddler image if a recent letter to Paddler and Canoe & Kayak magazines is any indication. In it, an Ottawa resident lambasted rodeo paddlers for lack of etiquette, littering and wave hogging at 1997's World Rodeo Championships on Ontario's Ottawa River.

Manufacturers and Marketing

Wave Sports is emblematic of how rodeo has changed the manufacturing environment. In 1996, 100 percent of Wave Sports' output was displacement-hull boats. In 1998, that will drop to 15 percent while planing hulls pop to 85 percent. Savage V, Riot and Necky's whitewater division focus almost exclusively on playboats. The flip side is that Perception and Dagger rank one and two in whitewater kayak sales, and at both companies displacement hulls still dominate (neither company would provide concrete figures). But the fact that Wave Sports ranks third in sales says a lot about where the sport is heading.

Hard numbers that support anecdotes of explosive growth in kayak sales are elusive. Competition is so fierce among manufacturers, all privately held, that they won't disclose anything other than percentages. And despite kayaking's growth, no one specifically tracks the whitewater market and its different niches. Still, no one doubts that sales are booming. "The pie is growing at an incredible rate for several reasons," says Corran Addison, a long-time paddler, boat designer and co-owner of Valley Fields, Quebec's Riot. "Now, one paddler buys two or three boats every year. Once upon a time, there was only Perception and it sold 2,000-3,000 boats a year. Now there are eight manufacturers selling 5,000 boats a year. They've got to be going somewhere. There's no doubt the market is growing at an incredible rate."

The emphasis on rodeo/playboat manufacturing illustrates the increasing niche characteristics of kayaking and highlights the sport's maturation. There are clear parallels with skiing and biking. Ten years ago, both those sports were in slow to no-growth mode, then snowboarding and mountain biking recharged them. Likewise, rodeo is reinvigorating kayaking, bringing in new participants and fueling the manufacturing sector.

Some, like Perception owner Bill Masters, consider rodeo/playboating an important segment of the business but not necessarily more so than other niches. It's just one more item on a list that includes cruising, hair- boating, squirting, creeking, touring and ocean surfing. "It's just like any of the other phenomena," Masters says. "Back in the 1981-82 era was when the squirt boat fad hit...tons of people were getting into squirt boats. Then we had creeking in the late '80s, early '90s. ... I think the rodeo market has peaked. We'll be able to look back in five years and say when it peaked."

The folks at Wildwasser/Prijon are taking a hedge approach: Don't ignore the rodeo/playboating market, but don't bet the farm on a single roll of the dice. "Our philosophy isn't chasing the rodeo market," says Prijon's Terry Delli Quadri. "We're trying to stay more centered on the whole picture--big people, older people, touring people. I think some of the companies are neglecting the wider market. They seem to think rodeo is where the pot of gold is going to be."

Prijon's caution stems, in part, from what its executives observed about the board-sailing industry. Starting with big boards in Europe, sailboard manufacturers soon began targeting high-end users, the folks shredding the Columbia River Gorge and Oahu's North Shore. Over about a five-year period in the late '80s, board-sailing turned so tech-intensive--with specific equipment for specific conditions--that it became too expensive and too much hassle for the average sailor. The lesson for kayak makers? "You have to make boats for everybody," says Delli Quadri.

For those kayak manufacturers now intent on rodeo/playboating, the immediate goal is to carve out a profitable chunk of an emerging market. Advances in technology and technique, plus the ability to paddle the same boat a Ken Whiting (1997 World Rodeo Champion) or Dan Gavere uses, are potent fertilizers for growing that market. "The products are better, they're easier to learn in, the instructors are better, and paddlers have things like video they can watch," says Callaway. "And they have heroes."

If the pie is growing, then so is the competition among manufacturers, a challenge in this brave new waterworld. More money than ever is being spent on research and development. Bringing a boat from design to prototype to volume production isn't cheap. Smaller manufacturers use guerrilla marketing, word of mouth and sales outside the traditional retail channel to curtail costs--but they lack the economies of scale of the larger companies. "We're not making as much money (as bigger companies)," acknowledges Bob McDonough, who took over boat-design duties at Savage V in January. "It's one of the prices you pay to stay in business in this sport. You can't sit on your laurels. Other manufacturers are losing market share because they're sitting on their laurels. I think Savage lost market share last year because it didn't have a new boat."

Marketing is an increasingly important variable for boat makers. In the not too distant past, when there were only three or four major boat companies, marketing demands were minimal. Now, marketing dollars account for an ever- growing chunk of a company's annual budget. Not surprisingly, those marketing approaches differ. At Wave Sports, the focus is on an image that combines post-Punk with retro '70s disco-polyester. (Kayaks and clothes made from the same basic material?) That comes through more in Wave Sports' advertising and promotional videos, but Zwanzig also sponsors perhaps the industry's biggest stable of team riders. "Every popular playboat in the last three years was a competitive rodeo boat the year before," says Zwanzig. "That's what is going on. It means that whether people are buying them as playboats or cruisers, they're buying the potential of last year's top paddlers."

Zwanzig cites Addison's insights in contributing to Wave Sports' direction. But while Zwanzig is pumping up Wave Sports' image as paddling with an attitude, Addison is focused on toning Riot's down. "The thing about Wave Sports is we're so rad, we're so in your face, you want to be with us," Addison explains. "Riot is not really about that, though it might seem so superficially. We have pro boaters but they're clean cut. Our whole thing is the best guys are in our boat because they have more fun in it."

While many credit Necky's Spike Gladwin with the introduction of the planing hull, Addison--the poster boy for extreme paddling--has been more influential in pushing rodeo competition to new levels. He has founded two boat companies--Savage and Riot--and the Savage Fury is widely considered the first of the new breed of rodeo boat. At Riot, Addison says he's moving beyond rodeo, focusing less on the professional paddler than on the recreational market. "What is rodeo? A cartwheel, that's it," he says. "We take the idea of high-performance playboating and say how can we make a boat that makes the average paddler look like a pro."

Retailer Retendo: Keeping customers coming back

Boom times in boat sales ought to have retailers rubbing their hands with glee. Maybe, but it's glee tempered with realism. Boat prices keep escalating--many now hover around $900--as manufacturers seek to offset increasing overhead and keep profit margins healthy. Retailers, meanwhile, are trying to strike a balance between old and new sales models: fewer boats with a higher percentage profit on each one vs. more models with slimmer per-unit profits.

That's not the only challenge. The ever-increasing number of boat models make inventory management more important. "It's a two-edged sword," says Dave Schubert, co-owner of Atlanta's Go With The Flow with father, Dick. "The positives are it's introducing new paddlers into the sport. The downside is...as dealers, we keep on having new boats thrown at us, sometimes in the middle of the season. It's getting hard to stock all these boats, and is very costly in terms of dealers' dollars. But we've got to stock them or we are going to miss sales." Schubert projects that 1998 will mark the biggest shift thus far in the kind of boats retailers sell. "Of the percentages of planing hull vs. displacement hull, planing probably makes up 65 percent of our inventory, with 35 percent displacement-style boats," he says.

While it's clear that the new-boat introduction cycle has accelerated, the subject of debate is how much. "People exaggerate when they say we're on a six-month cycle," says Keith Jensen, co-owner of Alder Creek Kayak Supply near Portland, Ore. Nonetheless, he acknowledges that the whitewater boat sales segment is changing. As recently as 1994-95, supply often lagged behind demand. Manufacturers, particularly the larger ones, are responding with faster shipping times. "Now, I think that in our store, six is the most of any boat model we'll ever have," says Jensen. "In order for a manufacturer to sell 30 boats a year in my store, they'll have to be able to ship on a six-week schedule.

"We're heading toward just-in-time manufacturing," he adds. "We're holding less inventory, they're holding less inventory." Jensen estimates that the '96 and '97 seasons were about equal in the percentages of planing vs. displacement hull boats sold: roughly 60-40. But planing hull sales last year would have declined, he says, without a boost from Necky's Jive.

Three other market developments are siphoning business from traditional kayak retailers: new retail outlets, factory-direct sales and the used-boat market. With the number of NOWR-sanctioned rodeos growing, along with attendance at those events, on-site sales are increasing. "Now, you might buy boat from REI, a specialty store or maybe from a guy selling off a truck at an event," Callaway says. "Distribution has been redefined." And with more paddlers owning flotillas instead of single boats, people are more frequently selling old models to justify buying new ones.

"The used-kayak market is becoming a lot like the used-car market," Go With the Flow's Schubert says. "Unless a dealer is savvy enough to pick up on that and take trade-ins, he's missed the game. We're trying to become the biggest used-boat seller."

Geographical differences affect retailers' ability to capitalize on this dynamic whitewater-boat market. Shops in the East and on the West Coast benefit from what's essentially a year-round season, though it's typically divided into creeking and cruising. In the Rocky Mountain region, where rivers depend more on snowmelt than rain, whitewater kayaking tends to be a warm- months sport. Playboating is changing that. "It has broadened the season, sort of opened up the shoulders," says Chris Cremer, owner of Alpenglow Mountainsport in Golden, Colo. In 1992, Cremer moved from Morgantown, W. Va., to Golden and bought Alpenglow. In the past six years, his sales marketing philosophy has gone through three evolutions. Initially, he focused on offering every model of every brand he could get. The next step, to conserve capital, was to offer fewer lines but go deeper into each one. Now, it's back to more brands but fewer models as selections available from each manufacturer increase. "Depending on where you draw the line on what's a rodeo boat, we're looking at about 85-90 percent of the boats we sell being rodeo boats," he says. "That's also our niche. We came around kind of at the right time."

For Rocky Mountain retailers, a more finite boating season means they must be particularly savvy at how they order and stock. "It's definitely changing in that in one season you need to sell your models because next year they're going to be outdated," says Nancy Wiley, owner of Four Corners River Sports in Durango, Colo. "That can be hard. Some shops are getting left with models they just can't sell. We've been doing pretty well, though occasionally we get stuck with a couple of boats.

"I don't believe you can carry all lines and do them equal justice," she adds. "We went through that transition a couple of years ago. For me to drop a couple of those lines in fact did open an opportunity for someone else to come in and open shop here."

Another factor affecting kayak participation and, as a result, boat sales, is the growth of urban whitewater parks. Alpenglow is within a half hour of four such spots in the metro Denver area, including a new park that opened this year in Golden, less than 10 minutes from the store. Four Corners is only minutes away from a whitewater park on Durango's Animas and even closer to the river's Santa Rita play hole.

Such parks are evidence of how playboating has pushed kayaking into mainstream awareness. With its emphasis on destination boating--or what Mark Lyle of Dagger calls "park and play"--rodeo kayaking makes whitewater parks increasingly popular. Couple that with municipal officials and economic- development types beginning to see urban rivers as recreation resources instead of sewer pipes and it's clear why playboating is riding a wave of popularity. The paddling community has long been active in river conservation and access but the hundreds of people now paddling in parks are moving river clean-up and beautification efforts to the front burner in many communities.

Rodeo's Future: Fad or Forever?

As Perception's Masters points out, kayaking has spawned a number of niches. In early stages, each niche attracts devotees, but as the bloom fades, so do sales. Will rodeo go the same way? Like the call on which line to take through a tricky rapid, opinions vary. One limiting factor may be the physical demands of the sport, whether in competition or recreation format.

"There are a lot of people popping Vitamin I (ibuprofen)," says Lyle, a Team Dagger member and one of the older members of the U.S. Whitewater Rodeo Team. "It's still kind of a lifestyle thing. That's where young folks have an advantage--they don't have to worry about jobs or security and they have a tremendous amount of time they can commit." As for Dagger, "We're still going to sell more displacement hulls because it is traditional," he says. "But I think planing hulls have just begun to be really understood. I think they're a thing of the future. Whether they'll overtake displacement hulls, I don't know."

As today's younger playboat paddlers make the transition to careers and families, and as their bodies age, the question is not so much whether they'll keep paddling as to whether they'll keep playboating. Companies such as Wave Sports, Riot and Savage are betting they will. "The equipment is allowing all applications to be converted into play instantly," says Zwanzig. "Even the fringes of the sports are becoming more playful. The sport is going to move world-wide in terms of entertainment value."

Another issue is just how far technology can evolve. Given how technique has advanced in just the past three years, the future looks limitless, at least from today's vantage point. Look for completely airborne flips to show up at competitions this year. "If it has been done once by accident, it can be duplicated by technique," says Lyle. "Ten years ago, what happened in the hole was a thrashing. Now it's being done on purpose."

Ken Whiting, winner of the 1997 Worlds on the Ottawa River, has a slightly different perspective. "I think we're getting to a plateau," he says. "The latest rodeo boats on the market are very specific: volume in the center, low- volume ends, flat hulls for stability and to spin. There are certain differences, but it's just a matter of fine tuning now." Whiting cautions that excessive emphasis on the elite aspects of the sport--competition and pro paddlers--could translate into a fatal flaw. "One way I see it moving is toward 'freestyle down a rapid,'" he says. "Use the terrain, do a number of different things. Now, with things like airwheels and eddyline cartwheels, it's amazing what you can do in one rapid."

With the growth of park-and-play paddling, there's concern that new entrants are poorly versed in the etiquette, safety and technique of running rivers. Moreover, many of the new hull designs may be great for multi-point cartwheels but lousy for running tough stuff. "It's easier to learn in short little playboats," says Four Corners' Wiley. "But what I see lacking are the years of experience and judgment that give an edge when you go into more difficult water. I'm afraid for that."

In the end, it may be television that winds up being the de facto measure for rodeo's entry into the mainstream. With the increasing popularity of televised extreme sports (i.e. ESPN's Extreme Games), rodeo looks like a perfect fit for the genre. The real test of how deep rodeo will go into these waters, of course, will be when rodeo starts showing up on television car commercials. Although sea kayaking and hairboating have already achieved that mark, Callaway, for one, isn't holding her breath. "There needs to be much greater awareness of rodeo for anyone to put it in a commercial," she says.