When he founded the Gig Harbor Canoe and Kayak Racing Team, Alan Anderson wrote an ambitious mission statement for the nascent club: to develop athletes who could race in national, international and even Olympic competition.

Eleven years later, Anderson said that goal is well on its way toward being realized.

“I thought I could do it in 10 years,” he said. “In 2012, I missed. In 2016, I plan on watching an athlete from Gig Harbor stand on the podium at the Olympic Games.”

Anderson, GHCKRT’s volunteer head coach — and a practicing dentist when he’s not out on the water — has been striving toward the Olympics for almost 30 years. He was living in Lakewood when he was in his 20s and doing some sprint kayak racing when he watched the 1984 Summer Games on TV and realized kayaking was an Olympic sport.

“I went nuts,” Anderson remembered, and he spent much of the next four years training on American Lake in an attempt to qualify for the 1988 Games in Seoul, South Korea.

“I didn’t make it,” he said. “I came close. But I was too old, and I didn’t have any coaches.”

CLUB SUCCESS

That drive never went away, and Anderson remembered those lessons when, in 2002, he prepared to start a canoe and kayak program for kids in Gig Harbor. Initially, he’d just take his son and a friend down to the water and park his trailer with his boats at the Pleasure Craft Marina.

Soon, marina owners allowed him to park there every time he took his growing coterie of young canoers and kayakers out into Gig Harbor Bay. He created a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, wrote the mission statement and began the work of building a winning team.

GHCKRT won its first national championship last year, taking the junior division USA Canoe/Kayak sprint contest by a wide margin. Forty-eight athletes participated, including four who have disabilities.

Anderson believes more success is on the horizon in August at the International Canoe Federation Junior and U23 Sprint World Championships in Welland, Ontario.

“I believe Gig Harbor will place at least one athlete in the finals of the junior worlds,” he said. “That’s really the height that an athlete in this town can reach before they go off to (college).”

Anderson is getting ready to send some of his young athletes to U.S. national trials in Oklahoma in about a month, and members of the team will travel to more international competitions, including one in the Czech Republic, later this year.

But Anderson hasn’t lost sight of his ultimate goal: the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. And the introduction of a new sport, set to debut in Rio, may help him get there.

PARACANOE

Paracanoe, a sport for physically disabled athletes that includes both kayaks and outrigger canoes, will be contested in the Paralympic Games, which follow the Olympics, for the first time in 2016.

The U.S. Olympic Committee sees in the new sport an opportunity to develop a winning team, said Mac Hickox, the national sprint development director for USA Canoe/Kayak, the Olympic Committee’s subsidiary.

“The USOC is all about the podium,” Hickox said, adding that the organization looked for “promising” sports to highlight in the hunt for medals at the next Olympics. “And Gig Harbor is the model for the country right now. No other club is doing what (Anderson) is doing.”

As a development boon to the sport, USA Canoe/Kayak offered $25,000 grants to clubs that could train Paralympic-level athletes. GHCKRT applied and was one of the only clubs in the country to be awarded a grant, a fact Hickox said speaks to Gig Harbor’s place near or at the top of the list of paracanoe programs in the nation.

Because Anderson and the rest of his coaching staff members are volunteers, the grant money went entirely toward new equipment: a fleet of single and double Viper 55 kayaks, with modifications for disabled athletes. The USOC’s money and spotlight has raised Anderson’s profile, even after two consecutive years of selection as USA Canoe/Kayak’s national coach of the year, and has begun to attract the attention of some of the country’s most promising paracanoeists.

“This is a world-reaching set of achievements that’s happening in that little bay out there,” said Grant Korgan, who visited Gig Harbor to train with Anderson two weeks ago.

Korgan traveled the world as an extreme athlete – whitewater rafting, skiing, paragliding and more – until he suffered a devastating spinal cord injury in 2010 while he was snowmobiling in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. The accident left him without movement or feeling below his belly button.

Korgan spent the past three years in recovery and also has written a book and toured as a motivational speaker as he describes his unlikely path back toward walking. He wanted his recovery, as soon as he was physically able, to include athletic competition, and he asked for recommendations for a coach he could work with. The suggestions came back from around the country: Anderson.

Now, Korgan and his wife are regular visitors, and they’re planning to move to Gig Harbor sometime in the next year to dedicate themselves fully to training for 2016.

Anderson said Korgan and another of his paracanoe athletes, Megan Blunk of Gig Harbor, have a real shot at the Games – their race times already are close to world-championship level, even without the benefit of full-time training. Blunk currently attends the University of Illinois on a wheelchair basketball scholarship, and she trains with Anderson when she’s home.

“They’re the real deal,” Anderson said of his two stars.

WOUNDED WARRIORS

Part of GHCKRT’s application for the USOC grant includes outreach to disabled veterans and “wounded warriors,” former soldiers who were injured in combat. The concentration of military members in the area made the grant a natural fit for Gig Harbor, said Missy Hill, a volunteer who spearheads the effort.

“Once we heard that the USOC grant would give us the opportunity to work with disabled veterans, we immediately thought about the individuals we could benefit here in Pierce County,” Hill said.

Hill is one of a number of GHCKRT parents who have become volunteers with the club. They take classes to become race officials, coordinate team activities and more.

Hill said she and her husband wanted to take the lead on the wounded warriors program as a way to thank Anderson for his work with their daughter, Katy, who joined the club when she was 12. She raced in two junior world championships and now attends Oklahoma City University on a canoe/kayak scholarship.

Hickox said the involvement of disabled veterans in paracanoe is another way the USOC hopes to build a medal-winning lineup of athletes.

“We know how competitive the people in the armed forces are,” he said. “We’re trying to put that energy into another discipline.”

Hill has been slowly reaching out to local service members through the Madigan Wounded Warrior Project at Joint Base Lewis-McChord. Last Saturday, GHCKRT held its first demo camp for disabled veterans to get a taste of the club’s equipment and techniques at Peninsula High School’s swimming pool.

Anderson and Hill put out an open invitation for the camp, which they hope will be the first of many, through different disabled veterans groups, including Team River Runner, a kayaking organization for wounded service members and veterans that has its headquarters in Portland, Ore.

“We’ve put it out there that we’d like to be the high-performance center in the country (for disabled veterans), so that, when a group identifies someone who wants to take it to the highest level, they’ll send them to us,” Anderson said.

PERMANENT FACILITY

Even with the racing team’s success and the bright future of the club’s paracanoe program, Anderson said that GHCKRT still has one disadvantage when it comes to development of its athletes: the club, 11 years later, is still based out of the parking lot at Pleasure Craft Marina.

“It’d be easy for me to develop a chip on my shoulder that we’ve been working out of a parking lot,” Anderson said. “But I don’t want to do that.”

In the club’s original mission statement that mentioned its Olympic ambitions, Anderson also wrote about his hopes to build GHCKRT a permanent home. For much of the past decade, he’s been involved, in various capacities, in an effort to convince civic leaders to build a boat shed at Skansie Brothers Park to house the team’s equipment.

That idea has mostly withered and died, Anderson said, a victim of competing political interests. But he’s hopeful about the Ancich property, a three-parcel piece of waterfront along Harborview Drive that the city purchased last August and is in the process of developing.

Anderson’s dream is to use at least some of that land to build what he called a “human-powered craft center,” a facility that would house both his team’s boats as well as sailboats, paddleboats and other craft for community use. He said some politicians have voiced support for the idea, although the discussion is ongoing.

For now, Anderson’s focus is on the future for his club and his athletes. In the near future, the club will host its second annual Paddlers Cup, a two-day canoe, kayak and paddleboard event that will feature races, demonstrations and clinics on the bay April 20-21.

Long-term, Anderson’s eyes are on the Olympic podium. He said a permanent facility would crystallize his club’s development into an Olympic-caliber program. And it would elevate GHCKRT as a point of pride for the Gig Harbor community, he said.

“I would like the community to be able to share in the success of our program,” Anderson said. “This is going to be a historic year, and a historic few years, for Gig Harbor.”

Reporter Will Livesley-O’Neill can be reached at 253-358-4152 or by email at will.livesley-oneill@gateline.com. Follow him on Twitter, @gateway_will.