Sonny sizes up a relatively large peak. Photo: Facebook | ISA
“I’m sure some traditionalists will be like: ‘I don’t like this.’ But the thing is, the horse has bolted,” says Julie Parkinson. She is the mother of Jessie and Jye, the eight and ten-year-old Quiksilver team riders sitting here alongside her in a villa in Bali. Along with them is their dad Dean as well as Lorraine Allen, the mother of 14-year-old Bali-raised O’Neill team rider, Sonny, who is also here. Together they represent part of the shift toward signing up children to major surf companies in a bid to prepare them younger than ever for a career at the top of the sport. It’s a trend that’s so far spawned the likes of Kanoa Igarashi, Jack Robinson, Leo Fioravanti and Kolohe Andino, and Julie says it’s only getting started. “It’s like golf, tennis and the rest of it. Now that surfing has gone that way, and people have trainers and it is a very professional sport, I think it is inevitable that it will start to filter down to the younger kids because that is what happens. You have kids with a tennis racket in their hand at three,” she says.
Jessie won his first sponsorship deal at the age of six courtesy of Darren Handley – an old friend of their dads. Jye, who was eight was also given a small deal, but shortly after, Quiksilver began asking whether they could send the boys some product. Dean and Julie agreed but when Billabong too tried to ply the kids with some product, Julie said she’d check with Quiksilver and the tit for tat began. “We said (to Quiksilver) look this has just happened. We’re not trying to play you off against one another, but we just wanted to let you know because you showed a lot of genuine interest from the start,” she recalls.
Quik said they’d be happy to “officially” welcome the boys to the team though there would be no contract offered nor would any money change hands, only product. The only condition of the sponsorship was that the Parkinsons keep Quiksilver up to date with the boys’ progression with videos, photos and social media and with updates on their contest results. The Parkinsons remained apprehensive.
“I was freaking out about the whole thing. Just whether this is the right thing to do as a parent? Will it put them under that, you know, kind of thing, so young?” recalls Julie.
But Dean, himself a sponsored surfer in his teens who’d grown up on the Sunshine Coast, believed it was an opportunity that might not come around again. “You see a lot of really good surfers up here (on the Sunshine Coast) that don’t have any support. The other end of it was we don’t wanna put them on the shelf too long because if they are interested in that sort of stuff and we pass it up and pass it up, it can be a lot harder to get in later on,” he says.
