Jake Gauthier Wins Turboshred Ocean Shores

Jake Gauthier defeats Jeff Kruger in the finals to become Turboshred King of Ocean Shores.

reported by Randy Silvey and Lisa Hunrichs Silvey

A Turboshred event was held in Ocean Shores Washington on September 14-15, 2002. The event included 12 competitors (and two additional jammers/supporters) from Washington and Oregon. Participants included: Mary Lowry, Lisa Hunrichs Silvey, Cindy Kruger, Bob Boulware, Randy Silvey, Steve Hays, Jeff Kruger, Jake Gauthier, Matt Gauthier, John Titcomb, Getty (Jeff) Freeman, and Dan Magallanes. Jammers/supporters included Barb Dunshee and Mark Janicke.

Ocean City is located three hours south of the city of Seattle, and about three hours north of the city of Portland, Oregon, making this small beach community a perfect meeting spot for jammers in the Pacific Northwest! To celebrate the last days of summer for the Ocean City Turbo Weekend Extravaganza, we rented a big beach house complete with hot-tub and great view of the shoreline, located directly on the dunes. Saturday was cloudy, but the beach was flat and wide, and the wind was steady! The group experimented with two different formats.

Scenario Numero Uno! Each competitor was given three tries to go for his/her biggest move. One person would work the disc while another would judge him/her, issuing a score between 1 and 100. When the person finished his/her move, the judge would pass the sheet down the line and then somebody else would go for it. This continued until each competitor had three opportunities to do their best combo. We then added up the three scores for each person, and the person with the highest cumulative score won. This scenario seemed to encourage people to concentrate on execution. We wanted everyone to “pull the rip-cord”, so we tried again with a little different twist.

Scenario Two: Like the first scenario, each person was given three attempts to pull off his/her hottest combo, another person judged the competitor and gave a score falling between 1 and 100. After each person had three opportunities, scores were tallied. This is where we tried an alternative option: the person with highest cumulative score and the person with the single highest score of all made it to the ‘finals’. These two finalists had a “jam off”. Again, each finalist had three attempts, and the one with the highest individual combo score was the winner.

The Ocean City jam off finalists were Jeff Kruger and Jake Gauthier. After a heated battle, and a enormous amount of good-natured heckling and hollering, Jake Gauthier won the Pacific NW TurboShred with a fabulous score of 92.

Participants seemed to prefer Scenario Number Two, as it seemed to open things up a bit more, encouraging jammers to go for the higher single score instead of trying for the cumulative score.

Options and suggestions for other events:

1. Take the top two highest scores to the jam off, without using the cumulative.
2. The current Turboshred king could be challenged at any time if there was enough of a group.
3. Points could be given for how much heckling the jammer was able to take and still pull off a great move!

Thanks and love from the great Pacific Northwest