Koa Smith has dreamt of making the Championship Tour for a long time. And at the Hurley Pro Sunset, he got a chance. Kai Lenny called in sick, which bumped Koa into position to surf Sunset. I’ve been wanting to be in a CT contest since I started surfing,” he says in the video above. “Six years old, watching Andy and Bruce… maybe even younger. Four years old watching Andy and Bruce just do their thing.”
A while back, Koa had an interesting opportunity. The Ultimate Surfer rolled around, and it was a shot at getting on Tour. He got an email alerting him to the possibility. “There’s this T.V. show that if you win, you just get on the CT,” he explained in September, 2021. ” I was like, ‘What?! You get to shortcut the whole qualifying series? That’s the best thing ever!'”
And while it didn’t work out exactly as he’d hoped (Zeke Lau ended up with the spot), the fire inside didn’t go out. So when the WSL texted him and told him Kai Lenny was likely not going to be competing, he headed down to Sunset to get his feet in the wax, just in case. As it turned out, he did indeed get the call up, but his draw was… hard.
“I looked at my heat and I realized that I was surfing against Kelly [Slater] and Matt [McGillivray],” he says. “Which I am excited about. If I’m going to be surfing a CT event, I might as well have a very stacked heat and try to take out Kelly Slater.”
In the dying seconds of the heat, Koa needed a 5.9 or better to move on. When the scores dropped, though, he missed it by a hair. A 5.67 from the judges meant his Sunset campaign was over, but Koa wasn’t devastated. “For me to be able to perform on that level and feel those nerves and be able to break through them; and plus get an opportunity at the end to almost beat Kelly? That was sick.”
And then, because Koa’s going to Koa, he drove down the road to Pipeline and got himself a few insanely good waves. All in a day’s work, right?
