Finding The Best Wakeboard Company. Riding Notes Explained.

Text and numbers alone don’t translate very well for choosing the best wakeboard.  The best wakeboard company guides an online buyer with size charts, flex meters, graphs, and specs for reference.

That’s fine and dandy but sometimes you just need a quick reference. This is where riding notes help.

Short verbal cues are known to help with visualization and memory. We like to use visualization for helping with wakeboarding. So why not help wakeboarders when buying online?

Even the best wakeboard company has struggled with language when it comes to describing how a wakeboard rides. It just ends up confusing the average wakeboarder. That’s no bueno.

A wakeboard’s shape & construction give the wakeboard characteristics that are surprisingly complex in combination.

Distilling these characteristics into something meaningful that wakeboarders can use to make a online purchase is not easy.

We are starting with something a bit different.

As we thought more about how to quickly guide wakeboarders to the best wakeboard for their style, we looked to outside the industry for inspiration. For us, we quickly found that in the wine, liquor, and beer industries.

They refer to a tasting guide called ‘tasting notes’. Just like it sounds, tasting notes are used by judges to score a particular brand of alcohol for a variety of things like aroma, acidity, structure, texture, and balance. Scoring is supposed to be objective when judges score the flavor characteristics.

We ‘researched’ a variety of alcohol brands for inspiration on how we can apply tasting notes to find the best wakeboard. Our goal was to distill a board’s flavor or style [riding characteristics] into something the average wakeboarder can understand quickly to make a decision for the best wakeboard for him without the use of complicated charts, graphs, or specs.

The result is something we call riding notes. Its simple.

Riding notes are verbal cues that we come up with backed by the scoring data for each wakeboard from the nebula that is created from the score.

They are meant to be simple, quick, and to the point. They help buyers make an informed feeling on what wakeboard rides the best for their style.

ie. This board is smooth. You carry speed through landings and turns are consistent.

Here’s how riding notes were formulated:

We selected what we thought of as the 12 most important board characteristics to score a wakeboard’s ride. Together, we scored on a rank of 1-5  for each riding characteristic. Together this creates an interesting visual shape, resembling a nebula of sorts.

Here’s the 12 riding characteristics we thought were important for selecting the best wakeboard for your style.

Top 12 Riding Characteristics:

Pop, speed, tracking, edge, turning, air tricks, durability (weight), ollie, pressing, ramps, rails, landings

Remember, like any style, what is appealing for one rider might not be the same for the next.

Review:

When reviewing each wakeboard’s riding notes, you’ll notice a particular board’s nebula shape is sometimes skewed to a particular quadrant. Other times the Nebula is more of a consistent shape throughout.

The consistency of the shape highlights whether a wakeboard has more ‘crossover’ riding characteristics. For this you’d see a more circular shape. For a wakeboard designed for a specific type of riding you’ll see a more abstract shape.

Apply:

We then take each wakeboard’s score and create short verbal cues to come up with what we’re seeing in the nebula of riding notes.

Choose the best wakeboard is all a matter of preference for your riding style. So in other words, there is no right or wrong answer, even if you prefer to rip around on a 1993 O’Brien Apex.

Below is each wakeboard’s riding notes score. We referenced this when creating simple verbal cues.

Remember, buying from the best wakeboard company can lead to confusion on what is actually right for you. Don’t take time to get ‘adjusted’. It should feel good right out of the box.