Business partners head over heels for each other

 

 

When Warwick”™s Bonnie Wright attended a ski show at Giant Stadium back in 1992, she met and fell in love with a trampoline champion, Ken Kovach.

 

Today the married couple operates Pinnacle Productions Inc., featuring an act called “The Skyriders” that provides half-time entertainment at sporting events and appears at other special public functions.

When Wright and Kovach formed their company in l993, he was three-time U. S. national trampoline champion. A native of Ohio, he had been “bouncing” for a company based in Utah when Wright met him, and she relocated there. Mother of a 3-year-old son by a former marriage, she was a marketing and advertising specialist when she and Kovach were married.

 

Watching Kovach perform acrobatics as high above the trampoline as 22 feet, she saw the potential of their going into their own business and told him, “We could do that together.” She yearned to return to the East, and they moved into her mother”™s home and worked part-time jobs while they put together a video to present to potential clients. Kovach did the performing, and his wife did the emceeing. The National Basketball Association was their first client.

 

“Early in the business we were doing well, rented an office and were living comfortably,” Wright said. “Then the NBA, our main source of income, went on strike, which forced us to get creative. Our team contacts assured us they would be back in the spring, but it was a little squirrelly for a while.”

 

Today their credits read the National Football League, Women”™s National Basketball Association, National Collegiate Athletics Association and National Hockey League. They were featured entertainers at the 2008 Nathan”™s Hot Dog Eating Contest at Coney Island and the State Games of the West in Colorado Springs, Colo.

 

The pair is especially proud of being awarded “best in show” at the International Motor Show in Bangkok, Thailand, where they represented Mercedes Benz.

 

Aerial skiing and snowboarding are a part of their act. They work with a pool of 20 trampoline artists from the United States, Canada and Belarus. “Right now we have two young men from the area that we have trained,” Wright said. “There is a 15-year-old from Warwick and a 10-year-old from Milford, Pa., across from Port Jervis.”

 

In 2000 Kovach set a Guinness World Record live on TV for hula-hooping on a trampoline, a title he continues to hold.

 

The couple uses competition-level trampolines that, they say, are very different from backyard trampolines.

 

The two business partners come from vastly different backgrounds. Wright has a

bachelor”™s degree in communications from the State University of New York at New Paltz and worked in that field. Her husband had older brothers who were into acrogymnastics. As a child he bounced on mattresses in his backyard, he recalled. Proficient in trampoline and diving, he got to a point where he had to make a choice and opted for the trampoline.

 

Both enjoy sports cars. Wright has a l982 Fiat Spider and Kovach dotes on his 1991 Toyota MR2.

The Wright son, Scott Schleiff, is now enrolled at SUNY in Oneonta as a music industry major. Wright anticipates that he will be a part of the business in the future.

 

With boundless energy, Wright does not confine her career efforts to Pinnacle Productions. Working from a home-based office, she has continued her advertising and marketing business and for the past five years has operated Wildflower Cottage, a bed and breakfast adjacent to their home, complete with its own kitchenette and cozy bedroom fireplace.

 

Challenging Careers focuses on the exciting and unusual business lives of Hudson Valley residents. Comments or suggestions may be e-mailed to Catherine Portman-Laux at cplaux@optonline.net.