Building skills for a lifetime of shredding Photo: Maui Diego
In a recent episode of Surf Splendor, retired longtime Championship Tour surfer and founder of surf lifestyle brand and media channel STEKO (previously Two Percent Surf) Kolohe Andino sat down with David “Lee” Scales to discuss the pros and cons of competitive surfing with a goal of going pro.
Andino brought up a good question: does competing push younger surfers to surf better, or does competitive surfing simply push younger surfers to surf the same way? In his own words, surf coaching doesn’t help kids advance in surfing at all, because “that kid just needs to watch surf movies and live in a wetsuit.”
Andino said to Scales, “the way they judge now, is that they judge on this snap in the pocket where they throw spray… it’s not real risk and it’s not real rail surfing. It’s a cheater turn. If you’re coaching kids not to progress, and to get scores… it hinders everything.” The two agree that surf coaching makes surfing not as fun for kids, it can ruin their style, and surfing should be “an expression of your personality… you should be having fun with your friends on the beach. It should be free,” Andino said. “You can’t teach people to surf like that.”
Before getting into the merits and limitations of this perspective, I’m going to throw in a personal anecdote. Surfing and skiing share a lot of similarities. They both have cult-like followings for their competitive styles with governing bodies, either the World Surf League (WSL) or the International Federation of Skiing (FIS). Both surfing and skiing competitions involve individuals drawing lines outdoors, and both tours involve athletes competing for points around the world. Both have superstars: Lindsey Vonn is almost like the skiing world’s Kelly Slater.
I bring this up because it would be easy to apply this anti-competitive-surf-logic to skiing. Banging gates, or ski racing, is like doing a “flick turn” for surfing. It gets you scores in competition, but it’s not the most interesting to watch. There’s a formula for success, and coaches teach it.
Most importantly, skiing and surfing both have mainstream ways to compete as a sport, dictated by these governing bodies, as well as freestyle or non-competitive ways to engage with the activity. Both have clear groups of people engaged with or actively opposing the “mainstream” version of the sport for similar reasons: it lacks creativity, skiing and surfing should be about feeling and expression, watching athletes perform similar moves gets boring, and so on.
I, like most people, grew up with one point of view as a kid (that racing was cool, it meant you had skills, and that made you the best skier) and moved to the other camp (that racing was lame, it was boring, and people should try different skis and ski different ways) as an adult. As a kid, I wasn’t hacking and double-pumping at Lowers with my parents on the beach, filming me. I was blocking slalom poles on an icy trail literally called “Comp. Hill” with my coach at the bottom, filming me.
Also, like most kids, I never thought twice about why I was doing it. There was no Kolohe Andino to grab me in my speedsuit and ridiculous looking cut-off ski bibs and shake me and say, “what are you doing? You could be dropping cliffs and surfing pow and getting creative with speed and flow instead of following the same charted-out line to beat a timer! You’re wasting your precious weekend being yelled at by a Polish ex-racer to sprint uphill in ski boots!” I just knew that other kids in my ski group were mostly faster than me and I had to keep my upper body still and roll my ankles and try to beat them.
And you know what? Like most kids, at the time, I genuinely enjoyed it. I had a great coach, I had the time and energy to master the fundamentals, I didn’t have a job or adult responsibilities to block me from enjoying the outdoors, and I made a lot of friends through training. As an adult, you couldn’t pay me to wake up at 6 a.m., go outside in sub-zero temps, eat a cold sandwich in the base lodge and then use the afternoon doing ski drills on a groomed trail, but as a kid, I was completely fine with it.
Now, I appreciate that time and investment my parents, like many other now-adults in skiing and surfing, made in me through the years. Not because I went on to become a professional ski racer (which, by the way, I absolutely did not). I appreciate it because now, as an adult without the time or money to invest in learning to ski from scratch, I have all of the fundamentals that allow me to really enjoy skiing. I have the fundamentals to be creative and to ski in interesting ways, which is exactly what Andino and Scales are wishing for everyone.
I moved to Tahoe on a whim and could actually enjoy the terrain that makes the area special. I could focus on the fun parts of skiing: chatting with other people on the bootpacks up, playing G.N.A.R., and getting a spot in the lot on powder days, without getting bogged down by lack of confidence in more difficult terrain. And I know that’s a privilege, because that’s not my experience with surfing.
While I can easily keep up with skiers who compete in Kings & Queens of Corbet’s around the mountain despite never having done a backflip in my life, I could never even join the lineup at Pipeline, pros taking waves or not. I’m limited to my creativity in the water as far as my fundamentals take me. Time spent learning new skills as an adult, like tube riding or skatey fin-releases, comes at the price of not being able to already play with that ingrained skill set. I attribute that, at least partially, to never having coaching or the same “drilled-in fundamentals” as a child in surfing.
Sure, my dad took me surfing as a kid. I had a couple generic vacation coaching sessions. But mostly, I just went with friends, like Andino advocates for. I messed around, hung out on the beach, did it for fun. I never had that repetitive, surf-coach-style learning that I witness nearly every session that I surf in San Clemente. It’s totally fine. But as an adult, sometimes I wish I invested that much time and effort into surfing as a kid. Because now, I notice those gaps between me, someone who surfed for fun growing up, and some of my friends, who were on surf teams or dreamt of going pro.
For example: when I got invited on a trip to Desert Point in Indonesia with a small group of friends I surfed with frequently, I had to say no. While I had no problem surfing Temples or Lakeys, a wave like Deserts was simply out of my comfort zone.
I bring this up because it’s easy to criticize kids for drilling the basics instead of chasing innovation and creativity. It’s not fun to watch. But it’s also easy to forget that to become an expert, you need 10,000 hours of focused practice. Messing around with your friends doesn’t count as focused practice. Surfing, recording it, watching it back, improving, and surfing again does. Just like ski racing, surf coaching is decidedly not cool or “core.”
However, practice leads to strong fundamentals, to confidence, to style, beauty, power, flow. Practice leads to all of the things we love about freesurfing. Practice leads to Steph Gilmore flowing a twin fin at Malibu so effortlessly. It single-handedly proves that competitive surfers can have style and can surf in interesting ways outside of the Championship Tour.
As Andino said about the value of a surf coach, “it’s good to have another set of eyes. [Pros] might feel something on their board, but maybe there’s another board that’s better.” While it’s true that coaching may crush some of the fun of being in the water, the joy those groms will have when they grow up and don’t have to learn any skills to surf any break in the world, they will be exponentially happier than people who are barred from certain lineups because they didn’t invest the time or have the coaching many of the best surfers in the world have under their belts.
I’ll end with one more anecdote. One of the best skiers I ever skied with was a kid who wrote for NewSchoolers. He wasn’t pro, he didn’t particularly seem interested in promoting his own skills, but he was casually the best skier on the mountain. With a thin mustache, baggy snowpants, and no helmet, he entered the park, got air on a medium-sized jump, threw a backflip, and landed it with ease. He jibbed every single rail down the line, doing tricks I can’t even name. “How did you do that?” I asked him, eyes wide under my pitch-black lens. “I was a slalom racer growing up,” he said with a shrug. “It’s all about edge control.”
