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“They’re excited to go, we’re excited to go, we’re just going to do our best,” said Emergency Turner Toni Estes.
Estes started her career at Louisville Water in 2002. That was just one year before Louisville Water’s all-women team took home the national title in a “pipe tapping” competition sponsored by the American Water Works Association. The competition involves tapping into a cement-lined, ductile iron pipe filled with water and then installing a copper service line while racing against the clock.
Little did Estes know she would soon compete on tapping teams of her own. Fast forward to today, and she’s coaching three other women.
“With Toni, we hit a homerun. She is the MVP. The way she has shared her knowledge with us is like none other. She will let us try our own way and if it doesn’t work, she’ll give us advice,” Emergency Turner Jesse Jewell said. “She’s the coach and the captain for a reason. She knows what she’s doing.”
Field Technician Taya Burrell and Distribution Planning Associate Devinn Tytus round out the “Lady Legends”. The team first won the Kentucky-Tennessee regional competition last September in Louisville.
“Compared to how our practices were in September to now, I’d say we’re a little more seasoned as a team, learning new strategies to make our tap better. I can see an overall improvement,” Tytus shared.
Now, they’re setting their sights even higher in the Mile High City – Denver, Colorado.
“The fact that we’re going to go to nationals in Denver, I’m just ecstatic,” Tytus said.
“I’m not nervous yet, but I’m excited. It feels good to represent Louisville Water,” Burrell said.
And the journey is even sweeter because of the special bond these ladies formed.
“I knew Devinn, I did not know Taya. Jesse and I worked together. But now that we’ve been together, we’re together all the time, and we’re really close. I’m very proud of them,” Estes said.
And that pride flows throughout Louisville Water.
“It’s brought a lot of people together because it’s something everyone can support,” Jewell said. “It feels like a huge accomplishment. At the end of the day, you just want to make somebody proud of you, and for us to be able to do that as a group, to make anybody here proud of us, it really means a lot.”
Burrell added, “It feels really good to represent Louisville Water as a woman. We are bringing light to the women to show it’s possible to succeed in a male-dominated industry.”
The Lady Legends compete in the preliminary rounds on Monday, June 9. Denver is the same city where a Louisville Water women’s tapping team clinched the company’s first national championship in 2000. Twenty-five years later, we’ll be cheering ever so loudly to repeat history!
