Vahine Fierro. Photo: Daniel Smorigo//World Surf League
There were two spots left open for Championship Tour qualification when the Corona Saquarema Pro began last week and unlike the men’s side, the women’s rankings didn’t see many shakeups. So what’s on deck for the 2025 CT and the wave of women that’ll be welcomed from the Challenger Series? For starters, two rookies who already won events at the CT level in 2024 who won’t be easy draws in 2025.
Sally Fitzgibbons
Sally Fitzgibbons has 12 wins at the CT level and 2025 will be her 15th on tour. Even after missing back-to-back, mid-year cuts, she’s a fan favorite at every stop. And she was a reliable world title threat for more than a decade. Her results at the CT level have slowly tapered off but we’re not talking about an athlete who forgot how to win heats — Fitzgibbons finished third in the world title rankings as recently as 2021.
Bella Kenworthy
Admittedly, Bella Kenworthy hasn’t received the bright spotlight that fellow teen superstars Erin Brooks and Caity Simmers have. But she qualified with room to spare thanks to her consistency. Kenworthy needed just under two full years on the Challenger Series to start stacking the results needed to qualify and sat out the Corona Saquarema Pro with her CT ticket already punched. She was 16 years old when she started her first CS campaign. She’ll be 18 when her rookie year begins at the CT level. Not bad at all.
Isabella Nichols
Like Fitzgibbons, Isabella Nichols treaded through relegation and earned her spot back on the CT. She’s shown her resilience time after time now, first winning it all at Margaret River to fight off relegation in 2022, then being cut after disappointing results there in 2023 and 2024. Nichols admitted that she almost quit after the 2023 result.
“Not making the cut was wild. That might even be the worst day of surfing for me, because I personally didn’t have control of the situation. Someone else did,” she said.
Then she went out and won the first event on that year’s Challenger Series schedule.
“I was like oh great I guess I have to keep doing this,” she admitted.
She’s still doing it. And she’s back on the CT roster.
Erin Brooks
The surf world has been declaring big things for Erin Brooks for a few years now. We have a tendency to do that with young stars in this sport.
The 17-year-old Brooks didn’t temper expectations when she got her call up to the big leagues in August — her first-ever CT event as a wildcard at Cloudbreak, of all places, and her first-ever CT win. What shouldn’t get lost in that mix is that Brooks took down Caity Simmers, Molly Picklum, and Tatiana Weston Webb in consecutive heats to get that win. All three of those women were competitors in this year’s WSL Finals and Simmers, of course, went on to win her first title.
Vahine Fierro
Vahine Fierro won the best event of the year on one of the most historic days in the history of women’s surfing. And like Brooks, she earned that win as an event wildcard. That’s what most surf fans will talk about and hear on broadcasts when Fierro shows up in 2025 as a CT rookie, but don’t overlook her steady progress to get to this point. Fierro sat around a top-10 ranking on the Challenger Series leaderboard in her previous three campaigns. This year, she came into the final event with a realistic shot at qualifying and was able to leapfrog Nadia Erostarbe for the final spot.
She’ll be another rookie on the 2025 CT who already has a (big) win under her belt.
