The CdM surf team is full of 28 athletic individuals who compete as a team against other local schools. For those who don’t know, a high school surf competition works in 8 heats (or rounds) and each heat is 13 minutes long. Heats vary from boys shortboard, girls shortboard, boys longboard, girls longboard, and boogie board.

Last year, the team competed against every school in their division twice, and 6 individuals qualified for the league finals; 4 of them placed in the top tier. Their most recent competition was on Thursday, November 4th, where they took the win against Mater Dei high school. The end score was 89-81 and it was neck and neck until the final 2 heats.

In an ordinary comp, the last 2 heats are boys longboard, and girls longboard. The 7th heat (boys longboard) usually is the tiebreaker if the competition is close. It’s rare that 2 schools that go against each other both have good performing boys longboard, so when the coaches scoped out Mater Dei’s boys, they knew they would be a-ok for that morning. Coach Hoose, (1 of the 4 CdM surf team coaches) gives some advice to the boys about going out to their heats. He says, “Let’s go boys! The waves look fun, but you are going to have to pop up a little faster than the Bolsa Chica wave last week. Go get out there!” The boys did great in their heat and placed high.

Moving onto the girl’s longboard heat, they were up against good competition, but they knew they had it in the bag. Although the girls were nice and friendly competitors, it was easy to tell the winners solely based on the boards they possessed. Two of the three girls were surfing on foam boards, while all 3 of CdM’s girls had nice performance longboards. This not only gives them the upper hand of looking more skilled, but allows for a deeper control when turning the board on the wave. The girls ended up taking 1st,  2nd, and 6th of this heat.

Sienna brown surfs the shortboard, but stays to watch the longboard heat, and narrates, “The girls put in a lot of work to place this high. I love my teammates”. Winning these last 2 heats pulled CdM forward by 8 points, causing them to win the whole competition. Hopefully in January, CdM will make it far into the league finals. Congrats CdM!