Three people have died in three separate standup paddleboarding accidents over the weekend, a reminder that while the sport is fairly easy for beginners to pick up, it can still be very dangerous.
As reported by SUP Magazine, on Friday, a football player for the University of Nevada at Reno died while on a paddleboarding trip with teammates on the western shore of Lake Tahoe in California.
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The football player, 20-year-old Marc Ma of Honolulu, was paddleboarding roughly 1.5 miles off the shoreline with five teammates when winds began to pick up on the lake and swells made the conditions dangerous. When his teammates got swept off their boards, Ma, an experienced paddleboarder, waved for help.
The staff of a local marina boated out to Ma and helped rescue his teammates and ferried them to shore. When they came back for Ma, he was nowhere to be found. After a day of searching for Ma the Placer County Sherriff’s Office called off the search efforts. According to officials, Ma is presumed drowned.
“The guy was completely unselfish; it was never about him,” University of Nevada at Reno head football coach Brian Polian told the Reno Gazette Journal. “Marc wasn’t, ‘What can I get out of this relationship?’ It was always about, ‘What can I give?'”
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