Insurance Office Manager Breaks Barriers for Athletes with Disabilities

If you do business with Sackville Insurance, you’ve probably met Officer Manager Vincen Liddle. He works the front desk of the insurance agency part-time every week.

The 39-year-old Dumont resident, who’s originally from Colorado, uses a wheelchair — the result of a terrible snowboarding accident he had on Dec. 31, 2007 in Colorado. But Liddle doesn’t let that hold him back. In fact, he’s been heavily involved with competitive sports for those with disabilities since then.

After his accident, Liddle wanted to get back into sports, so he looked into teams for disabled athletes. Over the years, he’s played for a number of teams, including Colorado Rolling Rockies, a wheelchair softball team; the Denver Rolling Nuggets, a basketball team; and Madonna Magic, a basketball team in Nebraska. And by 2013, he made his way to Iowa to play for the Iowa Chariots and the LWRSA Hawks.

His passion for adaptive water skiing began in 2013 when he tried it out at a clinic in Phoenix, Arizona. He picked it back up in 2015 with the Waterhawks ski team at Mercy Hospital Rehab Center in Cedar Falls, and the rest is history. He said he made the decision to join the Waterhawks team in 2016, starting with the slalom course, which requires having to zig zag around buoys. He has competed with the Waterhawks every summer since then, constantly pushing himself to learn and grow. He eventually joined the show ski team in 2022 to do trick skiing and then last summer, he added jumping.

“It was my first time jumping since the accident,” he said. “Yeah, there were nerves.”

While water skiing, he sits in an enclosed chair called a “cage” but he has plans of getting a new customized seat that will strap him onto the ski, so that he will stay connected to it when jumping.

“There’s just something about being on the water that helps me mentally and it helps me forget about everything else that is going on,” Liddle said. “It helps me forget about being in the wheelchair. I can just get out on the water and have fun.”

Liddle was the first athlete to compete in Show Skiing as an Adaptive Skier at a D1 national show ski tournament in 2023 and he hopes to make it onto Team USA Adaptive Water Ski team this summer to compete on a global level.

Scott Sackville, owner of Sackville Insurance, said Liddle couldn’t be more impressive.

“Vince has taken the Hampton Insurance arena by storm,” he said. “This bilingual champion takes care of our customers by day and flies through the air at night. Did he tell you about the time he jumped a shark on water skis? Yeah, that just happened.”