This may seem a little random to have a blog on the South African (SA) junior surfing champs, but as I was there I thought's I'd share a litte on the competition as well as just give you some pics to look through.
When Western Province (WP) first asked me to coach the team this year I was worried that it would once again sit slap-bang in the middle of the TTRide trip I was running, but I managed to this time negotiate things so that I could take the opportunity. With Chad assisting me on the trip, and being more than capable, I could leave the group in his hands and head up to Durban to coach the WP team. Ok, to explain, South Africa is divided into 9 provinces, and the SA champs is both an individual and team event, well each surfers result gives their team points which are headed up to determine the winning team.
To quickly sum it up how a surfing contest works is four surfers paddle out with 20 minutes to surf. Their waves are scored out of 10 and their top two scoring rides make up their final heat score. Their are generally 5 judges scoring the surfers with the top and bottom judges scores being cancelled and the average of the remaining 3 being the surfer score for the wave. Hurley put good backing into this contest making it one of the best ever with some great prizes too. The prize for the surfer who got the highest heat score of the event got a free trip to Australia next year, the winner of each age group won a Red Bull Mobile and the winners of the Boys u15 and u17 as well as the girls u17 winner won their national colours for world games next year.
The contest itself ran for five days and my job was to coach the WP surfer both in early morning, late evening and before each heat. This meant 5 days in teh scorching sun and a very sunburnt Mr. Bond! The support from the team mates for their competing surfer, and the atmosphere on the beach was truly amazing. The waves varied from day to day, but luckily hung around and were very surfable the entire event. The level of surfing was really impressive to watch but what really got me was how seriously these young surfers were taking the competition. I still haven't decided whether it was a good thing or not but these kids were really really focused!
My WP team did really well and coming into the last day of competition we still had over half of the team in the event, but this was when it really started to count. Josh Salie and I spent hourse observing the conditions and were really impressed with how well the team did, and some of our 'unknown' guys took out some big names!
When it came down to it we had 6 surfers in the finals, that is u13, u15 and u17 in both boys and girls. Our guys did really well and our u15 Max Armstrong won his final convincingly. The u13 boys final was a tight one and we knew it was going to be close for Jordy between first and second, as it turned out he just missed first place. Our u17 finalist Brandon struggled to find the good waves in his final and ended up in third place. Our u17 girl got an interference penalty two minutes into the final leaving her in 4 th place. Our u13 girl, and sister of the boys u15 winner, Ruth Armstrong surfed well to get second place. All in all they did really well.
It was a nervous time as they announced the overall positions as the closing part of the ceremony. We knew we had done well but WP had never won in Durban before so we knew it was a big ask. And, with 26700 points to Central KZN's (Durban's) 26666 WP won by a mere 34 points. It was close, too close perhaps but a win is a win and they team were overjoyed. A great first go at WP coach for me and big thanks to the TTRide guys for supporting me in pushing my own coaching to new levels.
Enjoy the photos,
Chris