Can our lineups take it? Photo: Reed Naliboff
It might not come as a huge surprise if you paddled out during the last run of El Nino swell in California. Or during an unseasonably warm Portugal February, you jumped off the rocks at Coxos to surf a few days of six-foot swell and offshore winds. Or maybe you became tangled up in the recent three-week endless swell on the Gold Coast. In all three cases, you wouldn’t have been surfing alone. In fact you may have seen more surfers in the water than at any previous times in history,
Now, it might feel that way. And each generation of surfers has always complained about the crowds. However, a long-term study undertaken by America’s Sports and Fitness Industry Association, has backed up the anecdotal evidence. Its top-line report has shown that between 2018 to 2022, surfing was the ninth fastest-growing sport in America. SFIA is an organization focused on sporting goods and works with manufacturers, retailers, and others who release a yearly report on the industry.
“Our overall takeaway is that the action sports industry is healthy, and consumers are being drawn into the sports that drive our industry,” said a gleeful representative from SIMA. Surfing’s participation rate of growth was supplied as 28.5 percent, just pipping recreational kayaking (23.1 percent) as the fastest-growing water sport.
Other surfing-adjacent action sports also featured heavily, with skateboarding estimated to be growing a healthy 38.8 percent (sixth on the list), and snowboarding coming in at 14.5 percent. Based on the findings, 1.1 percent of Americans ranging from six-year-olds to seniors surfed between 2018 and 2022 and the report estimated that there has been more than a 35 percent increase in surfers in less than a decade.
Mind you, that was a relatively paltry figure compared to the No. 1 sport of pickleball, which recorded a mahoosive 171 percent growth rate. The bastard child of ping pong, tennis, and badminton has transcended from its once-niche status and has become a full-blown cultural phenomenon. The number of players has doubled between 2021 and 2022 to about nine million and was forecast to more than double in the next 12 months. The sharp popping sound as the paddle strikes the hard plastic ball has become a new suburban soundtrack.
In Europe and Latin America, the pickleball craze can be replaced with the phenomenal growth of padel. This is a more hybrid version of tennis and squash, with walled courts played outside. It is however taking hold in the USA, with sales of padel products on Amazon up nearly 50 percent compared to the previous year, in the last quarter of 2023.
Of course, those increased numbers can be dealt with by simply building more courts or transforming existing tennis courts. The increased demand can be met with added supply. With surfing, the only analogy there is with the building of man-made waves.
“We’ve noticed in the lineups that over the pandemic, the surfing population exploded,” says Jess Ponting of Surf Park Central and an SDSU professor focused on sustainability in the surf industry. “This study confirms a 35 percent increase in core surfers from 2019-2021. That is remarkable and a pretty amazing data point for surf park developers to have in their back pocket.”
And while that market is expanding, with the major player Wavegarden expecting to deliver six to 10 projects a year starting in 2024, the build times and cost mean that in the foreseeable future, almost all of the increased number of surfers will be heading to the ocean and its finite resource. And unlike all the other sports on the list, surfing is the only sport where crowding, or over-crowding has a real and detrimental effect.
While the increased numbers are good news for the surf and surf park industry (and for the nation’s health, the report showed the number of physically active Americans grew for the fifth consecutive year), as demand continues to outstrip the wave supply, the lineups of the world are only going to get more crowded. The tipping point, if there is one, may be coming sooner than we all thought. Of course, you could all just go and play pickleball instead?
Here are the top 10 fastest-growing sports in America
1. Pickleball: 171.1 percent
2. Alpine (backcountry) touring: 115 percent
3. Winter fat biking: 69.4 percent
4. Off-course golf: 67.5 percent
5. Snowboard (backcountry) touring: 59.1 percent
6. Skateboarding: 38.8 percent
7. Trail running: 32.4 percent
8. Tennis: 32.3 percent
9. Surfing: 28.5 percent
10. Recreational kayaking: 23.1 percent
