Fellows specialize in hype

If you talk to the three fine fellows of Three Fine Fellows (3F2) about the not-for-profit status of their events promotions business, they will likely tell you that status is a default. They’ll gladly take a profit when they finally get one.

If you ask, the three fellows will tell you that their passion and energy for action sports, wet and dry, is what pushes them to operate their Coeur d’Alene events promotion business in their spare time. If it were for the profit and glamour, they’ll likely chuckle and tell you they’re way off.

“We try to make it about 40 minutes a day for time commitment,” said Matt Robinson, one of the 3F2 officers, from the desk of his day job as an account executive at Coeur d’Alene’s Imagination Graphics, which also serves at 3F2’s de-facto headquarters.

That’s the funny thing about action sports, according to Robinson. There are a lot of people interested in them and participation in events, but finding the energy and dollars to make events happen is the biggest challenge.

Two of the founding officers in 3F2 have a background in water sports. Jeremy Deming founded Krown Boards, a locally owned wakeboard, skate and snowboard firm, and he works as a wakeboarding instructor when he’s not bringing home the bacon as co-owner of Imagination Graphics. Rick Knott, mechanical engineer by day, is a Spokane-based veteran of the professional wakeboard tour with national and world rankings under his belt. So the three fellows immediately gravitated toward helping support a waning wakeboard scene in and around Spokane.

“The guys who were promoting events before last year just decided to get out of it, which left a huge void. So we jumped in and just starting asking ourselves ‘What does it take to run a contest?’ and ‘What does it take to get money to run a contest?’ So we started trying to raise the money, hype and stuff that it takes to put on these events,” Robinson said.

The trio quickly learned that trying to squeeze money out of the mostly rider-owned, non-corporate world of action-sports companies is next to impossible, so they decided to go bigger.

“We went to companies like McDonald’s and Pita Pit, and they were like ‘Where have you guys been?’ Like they’re looking to give away money for these kinds of events, but are having trouble finding the events to give the money to. It’s crazy!” Robinson said.

On the heels of their first full season of events, which included last summer’s Wednesday Wakeboard clinics on Hayden Lake, the Top Gun Invitational Wakeboard competition, Dukes of Hauser Freeride Wakeboard competition and several others, the three were amped enough to keep the ball rolling for 2007, and add some other sports and activities to their roster before the end of ‘06.

“We built some huge jumps that could be set up and torn down in seconds for a half-time show at a Spokane Shock and had some local mountain bikers and BMXers come in and rip it up,” Robinson said. “The crowd loved it, and they brought us back again this season, so we’re also bringing it and the slider pool to the event in July at Riverfront Park.”

The slider pool is what you get when you combine the heart and passion of a professional wakeboarder with the brain and imagination of a mechanical engineer. Essentially, it is a 25 by 200-foot two-pool traveling wakeboard show in which boarders are towed at breakneck speed by a high-speed rope winch called The Grinch over a 52-foot long rail.

Robinson was quite enthusiastic in the way he described the show the riders put on in the slider pool, but most of it can’t be published here because of his creative use of adjectives. Suffice to say, it needs to bee seen to be believed.

“Overall, though, I’d have to say our priority is to put on high quality events that we’re proud to be a part of. We put a lot of emphasis on leaving an area as clean, if not cleaner than we found it. We want parents of the kids who come to our events to be impressed, and we try to keep a positive atmosphere,” Robinson said.

For more information on 3F2’s Hayden Lake Clinics, the 2007 Inland Empire Wakeboarding Series, the BMX jump shows and all other upcoming 3F2 attractions, log onto www.imgxsport.com. To check out a video, search 3F2 on YouTube.