It wasnโt smooth or easy, but Hawaii school administrators, students and surfing advocates made a successful big drop this year with the introduction of wave riding as a statewide high school sport.
Close to 600 students at around 60 public and private schools are participating in the inaugural season of surfing under the Hawaii High School Athletic Association less than nine months after the state Legislature appropriated funding for the sport and less than seven months after HHSAA announced that enough schools would participate to hold a state championship.
The achievement represents what many supporters regarded as long overdue when considering Hawaii as the cradle of surfing.
Student-athletes in three divisions each for girls and boys โ shortboarding, longboarding and bodyboarding โ competed in three or four contests from February to April, leading to individual league championship events where top finishers will get to compete in the state championship scheduled for Friday and Saturday on Maui.
The biggest of the five HHSAA leagues, the Oahu Interscholastic Association, held its championship Monday at Kewalos where 108 slots were filled by students competing in 30 heats, each running 15 minutes for six surfers at a time. Two qualifying rounds led to a final round with one heat for each division.
A points system was used to recognize a school team as champion.
โWeโre going to crown a champion today,โ event announcer Iolani Adams declared shortly after the competition began with clean, often shoulder-high waves. โFirst time in Oahu history over here.โ
The all-day event at the break along the Diamond Head side of the Kewalo Basin Small Boat Harbor channel in Kakaako followed three earlier OIA contests where about 200 students from 20 public schools competed.
Thirty OIA schools have sports programs, and the 10 not participating in surfing this year were six charter schools and four regular schools. The otherwise strong turnout led organizers to divide two of the earlier OIA contests into separate two-day events with half the schools competing one day and the other half the next day.
Reid Yoshikawa, the athletic director at Kaimuki High School who became the OIAโs surf league adviser, said he didnโt know going in what he would encounter.
โWe had a lot of participation โ more participation than what I thought,โ he said.
Yoshikawa said he received much help from an advisory committee that included two parents involved with club-level surfing in schools: Joslyn Sato, whose daughter Kylie was an instrumental advocate for the legislative funding, and Amy Schiffner, whose daughter Elliana attends Kaiser High School and has been a competitive surfer since she was a small child.
Amy Schiffner said sheโs heard a lot of chatter at the contests from parents and students that they canโt believe surfing is now a high school sport โ and that they are part of it.
โThe kids feel incredibly stoked and also honored,โ she said.
Schiffner added that student athletes also have a lot of pride in being able to represent their schools and Hawaii, which is the birthplace of surfing and the only place in the United States where surfing is a statewide school sport.
Building up
Getting there wasnโt easy. Many schools needed to recruit coaches, who were required to obtain safety certifications before being able to hold practices. Students wanting to participate had to obtain junior lifeguard certifications.
For contests, county permits had to be obtained for surf breaks, some of which have limited slots that were already full. The events also needed to be managed, scored by experienced judges and monitored by safety crews on watercraft.
Students provided their own boards, but school buses couldnโt transport longboards and other equipment. Colored jerseys featuring school logos also had to be made.
All of it was accomplished with many contributing hands that included an offshoot of the Hawaii Surfing Association running OIA events and instant scoring results carried on .
Former pro surfer Shawn Sutton agreed to become the head surf coach for Campbell High School in Ewa Beach after another prospect couldnโt do it, and his friend Matthew Kenny, who competes in amateur contests, is assistant coach.
โIt was a little last minute,โ Kenny said.
Sutton wanted to hold practices at White Plains Beach in Kalaeloa but the timing of certifications got in the way. Instead, a school official was able to arrange three days of practice at the Wai Kai wave pool at Hoakalei Resort in Ewa Beach.
โEvery session they got way, way, way better,โ Sutton said of the school surf team.
Ten students โ seven boys and three girls โ competed at Campbell, and Sutton expects the number to grow next year because there were other interested surfers at the school who wanted to participate this year but couldnโt get certified in time.
Campbell, like other high schools that didnโt already have club surfing teams with volunteer coaches and competitions, had a harder time gearing up to participate in the new statewide league sport. Some OIA schools had only one or two competitors this year, including Kaimuki with one and Castle with two.
Some of the dozen or so Oahu schools with established club teams fielded the most competitors. One of those, Waialua, had 16 students competing in events this year and four coaches.
Waialua surf head coach Spencer Suitt said the team tried to train twice a week, including sessions at Haleiwa, Chunโs Reef and Kewalos along with cardio workouts on land. He said the schoolโs club is decades old and has a lot of talent, given proximity to so many premier contest breaks on the North Shore.
Suittโs daughter Skai, a sophomore, won the girls shortboard event Monday and placed second in bodyboarding and fifth in longboarding.
During Mondayโs first shortboard heat, coach Suitt was on a jetty cheering on Wyatt Falk, who placed second and advanced to the semifinal round. Sunny Drill of Kalani High School topped Falk and ended up placing second in the final.
Drill, a sophomore, started seriously surfing four years ago and considers Kewalos his regular surf spot. โIt was fun,โ he said after the first heat. โJust really fun, perfect waves.โ
Kaipoโi Koa, a senior at Kalani, has more of a wave-riding bloodline as part of a family from Palolo Valley where four generations have been big into bodyboarding. Koaโs mother, Kawena Garcia, said her daughter was catching waves in the womb.
โThe doctor told me at seven months I should stop,โ Garcia said.
Koa, who has competed since she was 3 years old, was beaming after posting the high score in the first of three qualifying girls bodyboarding heats.
โItโs just crazy,โ she said. โItโs, like, making history.โ
โThis is a huge win and journey for us,โ her mom added.
After two more heats, Koa became the OIAโs first girls bodyboarding champion and is headed to Maui for states.
Long journey
Teri Ushijima, an assistant superintendent in the Office of Curriculum and Instructional Design at the state Department of Education, also described the sportโs entry in Hawaii high school athletics as a journey.
Ushijima, who watched part of Mondayโs contest and hadnโt attended earlier ones, was impressed with the turnout and operation.
โWeโre really excited that so many schools are here and that our young female and male athletes have an opportunity to engage in a sport they have a passion for,โ she said. โAnd at the same time, like any of our athletics, you know we want them to really develop all their skills โ of course their athletic side, but really itโs about teamwork, supporting others and showing good sportsmanship, being a role model to their peers.
โItโs a journey,โ Ushijima continued, โand weโre very pleased that weโre making progress.โ
The state Board of Education approved surfing as a league sport in 2004, and two years later established regulations for it.
Those regulations, which were modified in 2016, allow each regional league to add surfing as a sport if more than half a leagueโs member schools vote to do so. Requirements also include ocean rescue training and other safety certifications for coaches and junior lifeguard-level qualifications for students.
Standing in the way for so long were concerns from school administrators about costs, access to good surf, an inability to control surf conditions, potential for serious injuries and drowning, and even fear of shark attacks.
Before this year, only the Maui Interscholastic League had surfing as a high school sport, which happened in 2014 after many years of frustrating efforts by surfing advocates.
The MIL, where 12 of 15 public and private member schools participate in surfing, had club-level surfing at some schools for 19 years and demonstrated that so much of the fear was overblown.
In 2024, a push at the Legislature to fund surfing as an incentive for expansion fizzled. But in 2025, a redoubled effort led to the passage of House Bill 133 to appropriate $685,870 this fiscal year and the same amount next fiscal year to help cover public school expenses for surfing if adopted as an interscholastic league sport.
How many schools and leagues would do so was uncertain after Gov. Josh Green signed the bill into law May 30 and even after HHSAA announced in July there would be a state championship.
Confluence
The Big Island Interscholastic Federation has about 100 students participating at 11 of 20 public and private member schools. Contests have been held at Honolii in Hilo and Kohaniki in Kailua-Kona.
Oahuโs private school league, the Interscholastic League of Honolulu, had 10 of 20 member schools participating with about 100 students. To accommodate varying surf conditions, ILH scheduled contests within four-day windows. Contests were held at Ala Moana Bowls, Sandy Beach, Rock Piles and Queenโs.
On Kauai, four of eight member schools of the Kauai Interscholastic Federation are participating with close to 100 students. KIF held its first two contests at the Waioli Beach Park break Pine Trees and at Kealia. A third contest was canceled due to weather before the KIF championship event.
Surfer and Kauai Mayor Derek Kawakami attended one of the KIF contests and joked from the beach that he wanted to surf in the first heat.
โTo all the student athletes, todayโs history,โ he said in a recent Kauai County Facebook video post. โAnd what this league is about is not about the best surfers and bringing out the folks that are going to go pro. Itโs really a sport for everybody. So, even if you donโt think that youโre ready, paddle out there and do a heat because thereโs only one time you can do it for the first time and go down in the history books.โ
Kawakami said KIF received valuable help with its participation in the sport from Kim Ball, who helped spearhead Mauiโs effort more than a decade ago. Ball, a former Lahainaluna High School wrestling coach who has a chain of surf stores on Maui, said in an interview that heโs glad the sport is now statewide at high schools.
โWeโre stoked that itโs finally a reality,โ he said.
The state championship is slated to take place at Mauiโs Hookipa Beach between Paia and Haiku.
โWe couldnโt be more thrilled to host the first one,โ Ball said.
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