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ANDREW MARTIN, a 14 year old from  Eaton, Ohio, was been selected as the December 2002 Footer of the Month.

I have many reasons for picking Andrew to be the last Footer of the Month you read about in 2002.  For those of you who know Andrew, you'll agree with me that he has got to be one of the most soft spoken and polite young footers I've ever met.  

A lot of people will mistake Andrew's quite demeanor as a sign of weakness of lack of aggressiveness, but we here at BarefootCentral know otherwise.  We know that Andrew is always thinking of ways to improve his skills both on the water and off.

Andrew was pro-active this year and approached me to ask if he could help out in any way with the website.  He didn't care what I needed, he just wanted to help. So I started him off re-typing Mike Siepel's Coach's Corners answers.  You see, Mike doesn't type to well, so he writes his answers and faxes them to me.  His hand writing leaves a lot to be desired sometimes.  Andrew would decode, re-type, edit and spell check the documents for me.

Andrew also stepped up to the plate when I needed extra footers to help us with the Ski School Review.  I selected five footers from around the country to attend certain schools and give me their feedback.  Part of the requirement to be a reviewer is you need to be able to be a fair judge, not be intimidated by the fact that you are meeting and reviewing the top footers in the world, and be able to articulate your opinions both verbally and in written format.  Andrew met all the requirements and proved a very valuable judge.

When I needed a training partner prior to the 2002 Nationals, I called up Andrew's father (Clif Martin) and asked if Andrew would be interested in coming to Dallas for a week to train with me.  I needed someone I knew would focus on the goal at hand.  Andrew said he would if he could also learn a toe-up while with me.  So to Dallas he came, and within a weeks time he not only learned a long-line toe-up consistently, but he made serious progress on his surface turns.  Despite the progress on the water, I was most impressed with Andrews ability to ingest any amount of knowledge that was around him.  While with me, he was able to look over my shoulder as I made changes and added content to BarefootCentral.com.  Andrew asked tons of questions and showed me a thing or two on the computer.  Andrew had taught himself how to do web page development and was eager to learn about things like forms and streaming video.  Within a weeks time he had mastered my video editing software and had created several videos of us skiing.  He also learned a lot about digital photo editing, sizing, and publishing.

Andrew took all his new internet skills back home with him and put them to use as he published the NEW Junior Barefoot Page.  You can check it out at http://my.voyager.net/~cpmartin/.  Andrew even designed the logo.

You can also check out one of Andrews videos by clicking this video logo. 

So for for all of those reasons, I decided Andrew needed to be recognized as a Footer of the Month.  His commitment to the sport is awesome!!  Way to go Andrew!

Chuck Gleason

Congratulations Andrew on being selected as the BarefootCentral.com Footer of the Month.  You are someone to be reckoned with on and off the water, and most importantly, you are now eligible to become the 2002 Footer of the Year.  Good Luck!