They have been battling it out for years. The wakeskaters versus the wakeboarders; which one is better? Who has more tricks? Who gets more girls? There's a lot of factors here but lets go over some.
Both sports are fun. Wakeboarding you can get huge air; wakeskating you can do badass tricks. They both have their advantages. With wakeboarding you can do backrolls, tantrums, 1080's, and get higher than Bob Marley at a Jamaican concert in May. With wakeskating you can do shuv's, kickflips, butterslides, and your feet don't have to stay on the board which makes for a ton of flexibility (and new tricks to come).
But with advantages comes disadvantages. For one, with wakeboarding, all that air comes with some consequences. Lets say you overspin that 1080 and come down hitting the other wake sideways... a world of pain. The boat is going at least 22mph, your going sideways and coming down, which increases the speed tremendously and then face planting the water at who knows how fast! When something like this happens concussions are a definitely factor here. Second, your strapped to your board. This can be a good thing for tricks like backrolls and tantrums, but what about more flexibility of tricks? Not only that, like I said before, being strapped to the board on falls equals a world of pain.
If that's the case, what could be the disadvantages of wakeskating? Well with wakeskating, you are not attached to the board which provides a huge variety of tricks, tricks very similar or the same as skateboarding. The only disadvantages would be not being able to get as big of air (which is actually okay sometimes ex. concussions), as well as not being able to do some of the big tricks you can do on a wakeboard, such as the backflips I was talking about before.
So while both sports have their advantages, I'm definitely in favor of wakeskating versus wakeboarding. This is because the variety of tricks, as well as knowing you aren't going to become brain dead because you went to high on a jump and got scared in the air. Tootles!
