Louisville junior Erica Dumeyer keeps her national and world championship trophies on her dresser to remind her to work and train hard.

“I keep looking at them and I keep thinking ‘next year – I’ve got to get that next year,’” she said.

This summer, Dumeyer won both World Wakeboarding Association National and World Championships within a month of each other.

She can add the two to her growing collection of trophies, ribbons and medallions from wakeboarding and the WKU equestrian team.

The biochemistry major said she spends most of the time she’s not in class doing homework or playing sports. She also plays intramural flag-football and runs and lifts weights during the offseason.

She’s been active in wakeboarding since she was 14-years-old.

“I’ve been raised down at the lake every summer,” she said. “I water-skied when I was five and started knee-boarding when I was eight, so it was just the new sport to try.”

Dumeyer’s competitive personality drives her to balance her athletic and academic lives.

“I like to be the top of the pack; I like to be the best of the best at anything,” she said.

But in the comparatively small world of wakeboarding, a friendly competition is key. Dumeyer said she tries to develop friendships with the women she competes against.

“Then it’s not that competitive atmosphere; you’re just going out and riding your best with your friends, because you ride with the same people all summer,” she said. “You know everybody; everyone cheers for everybody else.”

For Dumeyer, the sport has become a family affair of sorts. Family friends Robynn and Mike Brown run Nick’s Boat Dock Marina at Rough River Lake in McDaniels, Ky., where Mike Brown trains Dumeyer and her three nephews.

They train from 9 a.m. until 10 p.m during the summer. Black Stone Cherry, AC/DC and Pantera blare from the wet speakers of their Malibu boat while they practice inverts (flips) and spins.

At competitions, Dumeyer listens to Hoobastank, Tantric and Nickelback on her iPod to pump her up.

“I always have to play Survivor’s ‘Eye of the Tiger’ right before,” she said. But during runs at a tournament, the boat is silent; competitors aren’t allowed to play music in competition.

This year was Dumeyer’s first at the WWA championships. A week before nationals, she went with her nephews to train with a trampoline coach in St. Louis, where she met 9-year-old wake boarder Taylor McCullough, who asked if she was planning to go to the championship in Wisconsin.

Dumeyer convinced her mother to drive six hours to Kenosha, Wisc., the second week of August.

When she got to the championship, she found she was the only competitor in her division.

“I was like ‘What do I do? Do I just go out there and compete?’ and they were like ‘Yeah, you just run your run,’” she said. “So I did.”

And she came home with a trophy and a ticket to the Worlds in a month.

At the world championship, all the women who would have been in Dumeyer’s division were bumped up to another because of their ages.

Dumeyer said the defining moment of her wakeboarding career occurred a week after winning worlds in Oklahoma City. She caught a red-eye flight to Orlando, Fla., to help Nick’s representatives buy new products from Surf Expo, a trade show for water sports apparel and equipment retailers.

“All the pros are there from the brand new rookies to the old guys who started the sport,” she said.

Cathy Williams, a professional wakeboarder from Murray, guided Dumeyer around to meet some other professionals.

She was introducing me to people, and she was like, ‘This is the world champ.’”

Reach Eileen Ryan at diversions@chherald.com.