The concept of water skiing dates back to at least the mid-nineteenth century when a man from Sweden began the patenting process, but the concept never came to fruition. Very little is known about the true beginnings of the sport, though the term can be found in the Swedish dictionary dating back to 1921 - vattenskida, which translates to ski on a body of water.

It was approximately a year later when light was seriously shown on the idea. It was on June 28, 1922 when an eighteen-year-old young man named Ralph Samuelson made the realization that if you could ski on snow, then it was not farfetched to believe you could ski on water. The first time he attempted to see if his concept held any water, so to speak, was on Lake Pepin in Lake City, Minnesota.

Using curved barrel staves bound to his feet with leather straps and towed by his brother Ben by simple clothesline, he was off! The brothers experimented for several days until July 2, 1922 when Ralph discovered that leaning backwards with the tips of the skis up proved for successful water skiing.

Several claims have been made as to who first came up with the concept of water skiing, although the American Water Ski Association (AWSA) formally accepted Samuelson as the first on record in 1966 from his attempts in 1922.

Samuelson started taking his water skiing stunts on the road, traveling all of the East coast of the United States where large bodies of water could be found.

Samuelson never patented any of his equipment - he was too busy having fun and showing off his discovery. A man by the name of Fred Waller patented the first water skis, calling them "Dolphin Akwa-Skees."

Soon after Waller's patented equipment made its way into the market, water skiing became a largely popular exhibition game By the late 1920s and early 1930s. In 1939, the first national water skiing championship was held at Jones Beach in Long Island, New York.

Over time, as the concept of water skiing became more and more popular, it started evolving, and becoming trickier and more advanced. Three different divisions were created - slalom, trick, and jump. Competitors were grouped usually into gender and age.

Slalom courses started out as a simple row of buoys in a line, which the skier had to ski in and out of, much like an obstacle course. Slalom courses have a sequence of buoys set in a straight line eight feet apart from each other and a sequence of six prearranged buoys, which constitutes the entrance and exiting gates. The boat towing the skier travels down the middle of the buoys at a specified speed and the skier goes in and out of the buoys to get around them. The driver of the boat needs to be quite a bit of focused too - his job is to keep a straight path while keeping within a half-mile an hour of the chosen speed. The skiers can hit speeds up to 70 miles per hour and slow to around 20 miles per hour up to six times within a seventeen-second time-frame!

Trick skiing usually is where the skier holds their rope by one of their feet using a special harness. They do jumps and flips where points are awarded based on the difficulty of their tricks they perform. The skier has 20 seconds to perform as many tricks as possible and is allowed two trick runs.

Jump skiing seems to bring the in the largest. The jump ramp heights can be between 2 1/2 to 5 1/2 feet with a maximum boat speed of 36mph. With these factors, the skier can jump over 200 feet!

Water skiing became an exhibition sport at the 1972 Olympic Games in Kiel, West Germany. Today, there are over 650 water skiing clubs with over 11 million participants just in the United States alone with millions more worldwide.