A father built a ride out of plywood and a rubber tube and pulled his son across the lake.
Another boy grew up in a family that knew water, work, and the business of getting people out on it.
How Two Families Found Each Other
On Long Lake in Minnesota, Leroy Peterson's father built a homemade towable and sent his son skimming across the surface.
Before he ever built a product professionally, Leroy had already been shaped by one — and by a father who believed that the best things in life move fast and feel effortless.
JASON JOINS LEROY
THEY FOUND WOW
On the Missouri, Jason Koranda grew up in a family shaped by watersports, product, and the rhythm of life built around water.
He did not just arrive with operating experience. He arrived with instinct — for the customer, for the product, and for what it means to build something families actually use.
The story of WOW Sports did not begin in a boardroom. It began on two different bodies of water, years apart.
Before they ever met, both had already been raised in the same language: performance, durability, and the kind of fun that earns its place in family memory. So when Jason stepped into Leroy's world, the connection was immediate. One had spent decades imagining what watersports products could become. The other knew exactly what it meant to build a company around the moments families remember forever.
WOW Sports became the place where those two lines met — and kept moving.
"When Jason walked into Leroy's world, he already understood it. He had been raised in it. Two families, shaped by the same instincts, finally found themselves building the future together."
Leroy Peterson — The Godfather of Towables
CO-FOUNDER · 1942–2022
Leroy Peterson saw products the way other people see possibility. He could look at a blank page and imagine not just the shape of a towable, but how it would ride, where it would flex, how it would pull, and what it would feel like when a family used it for the first time.
He sketched constantly. Not for show. To solve. To refine. To get closer to the version that would work best on real water, under real pressure, with real people hanging on.
That was his gift. He brought an artist's eye to a category that depends on engineering, and he never treated those two things as opposites. At WOW Sports, design was never decoration. It was performance made visible.
Leroy passed away in 2022, but his thinking never left. It lives on in the curves, the construction, the balance, and the details that make a product feel right the moment it hits the water.
"He was an artist, but his canvas was the water. He could see the product before anyone else could — and then keep refining it until it felt inevitable."
— JASON KORANDA, ON LEROY
JASON KORANDA — CARRYING IT FORWARD
CO-FOUNDER & CEO
Jason Koranda is not preserving WOW Sports as a time capsule. He is building it forward.
His connection to these products goes back further than most people know. He was around ten years old when his father and Leroy Peterson started Sportsstuff — a watersports company built on the Missouri River. Jason was their test dummy. Leroy would sketch a new shape, build a sample, and Jason would ride it. Then another. Then another. Hundreds of prototypes, over years, in every configuration Leroy could imagine.
That foundation never left him. When Jason eventually started WOW Sports with Leroy, he wasn't arriving from the outside. He was carrying the same DNA — the same river, the same instinct, the same belief that a product isn't finished until a real person has ridden it and told you the truth.
For the first ten years of WOW, he was still the one getting in the water. Leroy still made the samples. Jason still rode them. The founder's craft and the rider's instinct, working together on every product that left the building.
Growing up around watersports this way, he learned early that great products are not just sold. They get folded into family life. They show up in photos, in traditions, in summer stories, and in the kind of weekends kids remember long after they grow up. The product is never really the point. The memory it makes is.
That is what drives him now. Not nostalgia. Responsibility. To build products that hold up, stand out, and keep earning a place in the moments families care about most.
Jason grew up on the Missouri River in a family already rooted in watersports. His father, Jim Koranda, co-founded Sportsstuff with Leroy Peterson — and Jason, starting at around age ten, became their product tester. He rode hundreds of prototypes over the years that followed, in every shape and configuration Leroy could dream up.
When the time came to build something of his own, Jason brought that world with him. WOW Sports was not a departure from where he came from. It was the same river, the same values, the same DNA — carried forward into a new company built for the next generation of families on the water.
"Leroy made hundreds of samples every year. I was the one riding them — at least for the first ten years of WOW. I think I have a legitimate claim as someone who has ridden more towable types and shapes than anyone in the history of the sport. And it all started when I was a kid on the Missouri River, being a test dummy for Leroy and my dad."
— JASON KORANDA, CO-FOUNDER & CEO
FROM LEROY'S SKETCH TO THE LAKE
Every WOW Sports product begins the same way the brand did: with a clear idea of how fun should feel, and the discipline to build it right. The process has evolved, but the standard has not.
Quality — Built to Be Used
WOW Sports products are made for real family use — weekends at the lake, long pool days, backyard chaos, repeat inflation, repeat impact, repeat memories. That means quality has to be more than a promise. It has to show up in the materials, the construction, the testing, and the consistency.
The company backs every product with a 2-Year Warranty and a clear process for support. Products are reviewed before production, inspected during manufacturing, and held to standards built around actual use — not just appearance out of the box.
Real Families — Real Memories
Your family's next memory is waiting.
Omaha, Nebraska · Built on two rivers · Made for generations
The WOW Family
The story started with two families on the water. Today, it keeps going with thousands more — at the lake, in the pool, in the backyard, wherever people gather to make the most of the time they have together.
