Jen Johnson used to own the best surf team in Texas. She even had the trophy to prove it: the coveted Wes Ellsworth Memorial Bell. Now, on the trophy shelf across from her checkout counter, there’s just a hole where it used to be. “It would go right up there,” says Johnson, pointing up to the shelf, on which 20 shiny surf trophies are perched. “We’d just, woosh, slide all those suckers apart and put it right up front and center.”
The trophy is awarded annually by the Texas Gulf Surfing Association (TGSA), the state’s governing body of surfing, to the Texas surf team that accumulates the most points across the season’s five competitions, usually held in the surfing hubs of Galveston, Surfside, Port Aransas, Corpus Christi, and South Padre Island.
In July 2021, when Johnson and her husband bought Southern Spears Surf Shop, on Galveston Island’s seawall, its namesake team had recently won the bell. It was a sad day for Johnson, less than a year later, when she surrendered the frozen-margarita-dispenser-sized trophy to another surf shop, Corpus Christi’s Wind and Wave Watersports, whose team has had it since.
TGSA South padre open
Current call dates are Dec. 7-8 and 14-15. The competition will take place at Clayton’s Beach Bar. surftgsa.org
On this rainy day at her shop in early April, even Poopie, Johnson’s bandana-clad chihuahua—and two-time champion of Galveston’s dog-surfing competition—seemed anxious. The Galveston Open had been held a couple of days earlier. If the surf was up, the season’s main event, the Texas State Surfing Championships, which have been held every year since 1967, was going to take place the coming weekend six hours south in South Padre Island.
The decision to hold the tournament sometimes doesn’t happen until a nail-bitingly-late noon on the day before a contest. This is because, unlike the east and west coasts of the United States, where there are predictable groundswell waves, the majority of surfable waves in Texas are generated by local storms, or windswell, which can be fickle. Aside from the occasional hurricane that crosses the Gulf at just the right angle, that’s just what we have here in Texas.
This year’s Galveston Open was postponed five times before being held on the last-possible on-call date. Last year’s championships were halted mid-way due to a storm that took everyone by surprise, and most of the final heats were run two weeks later in Port Aransas. “That’s Texas though!” says Kristen Darden, president of the TGSA, laughing off last year’s misadventure.
Fortunately, despite some doubt about the winds being too strong, this year’s championships were called on a full day and a half before they began. So I join the pilgrimage down to South Padre Island, a long drive for some, but it’s where the best surf in Texas is. “It gets epic when it gets epic,” explains Rob Meza, the head judge for the TGSA.
Isla Blanca State Park, where the championships are held, is at the southern tip of the island, where crowds periodically gather to watch SpaceX shuttles launch. Once I get into the park—after circumnavigating an expansive trailer park and skirting by an oversized statue of Jesus, arms widespread, looking out over the shipping channel—I find the TGSA team. They’re next to their double-decker judge stand, a couple hundred yards north along the beach, struggling against 20-plus-mile-an-hour winds to get their tent canopies in place.
I can hear Stefan Lewis, the vice president of the TGSA, articulating to a group on the boardwalk something about how El Niño was affecting the winds this season, and most of the surfers were looking a little concerned about the conditions. “May the best man win,” Lewis says. “Whoever has a four-leaf clover.”
Shortly after 10 a.m., an air horn sounds off and a green flag appears atop the judge stand, signaling the start of the first heat of the day. Two pods of surfers on longboards, one to the north of the judge stand and one to the south, start vying for waves. They find relatively clean and rideable surf, with the biggest sets reaching nearly 5 feet high, but only after a punishingly-long paddle out through the whitewater rollers to the second sandbar. The furthest-outside waves were breaking, and a longshore current was pushing surfers north into the wrong zone.
As nearly every Texan surfer I speak with tells me, if you can learn to surf in Texas, you can surf anywhere. Maybe it’s because of this shared hardship that Texas surfers have a reputation for being exceptionally friendly. “That’s the thing about Texas,” says John Jones, the TGSA’s treasurer and longtime Texas surfer, who was lounging in a camping chair under the main TGSA canopy, “we just all get along.” This friendliness extends into the competitive arena as well. Johnny McGee, who at 71 is the oldest surfer in this year’s championships, describes the convivial nature of competitive surfing in Texas as “just kind of good stoke for everybody.”
If you’ve never been to a surf competition, it can be confusing. The number varies by tournament, but TGSA heats generally have four people, so there are, at any given time, eight people bobbing around and the only way you can tell them apart is by the color of their jerseys. The TGSA judges are good, and have a better view from their stand, but they still have to contend with other surfers, windsurfers, and kiteboarders encroaching on the competition area.
The scoring is on a 10-point scale, and judges weigh the surfers’ wave selection, speed, power, and flow. “You see it and it all kind of melts together,” Meza says. “It’s like ‘Oh! Boom!’” The two highest-scoring waves for each competitor are added up, and that’s their score. The surfers have no idea whether they’re winning or losing until they get back on the beach and huddle around the scoreboard monitor.
With 133 competitors in 23 different divisions based on age and gender, there are a lot of people duking it out for several trophies. Aside from the prizes, many surfers have their eyes set on the opportunity to be one of the eight surfers the TGSA nominates to compete in the under-18, amateur USA Surfing Championships at Lower Trestles, a world-famous surf spot in southern California. “Everybody wants to surf Lowers,” Darden says. The most competitive divisions of the Texas championships are the opens, which have cash prizes. This year’s Open Shortboard, with 16 contestants, had the largest payout: $1,000 for first place.
One of the paradoxes of competitive surfing is that competitors need to appear laid back while clawing at victory.
“You can’t take nothing too seriously,” says Ian Appling, a competitor, who is passing the time between heats by getting a haircut under the Benjamin Surf Shop canopy, “or else you’re just a try-hard lame-o. We’re just here to surf, support each other.”
“No, we’re here to win,” adds his teammate, Isabella Bertero.
Most of the first day passes without incident. A couple of surfers are called out for wearing the wrong color and some parents complain the judges had missed their daughter’s wave. At one point, Zack Taylor, a 9-year-old surfing prodigy, who splits time between Texas and California, almost misses a heat. He’s one of several talented young surfers here today, including Evylyn McDevitt, Keagan Sohl and Yates Haris. Toward the end of the day, one of the tablets that the judges use to score the competition went offline. “We’re like a mildly-oiled machine up here,” Meza jokes.
On day two, the first round of Open Shortboard gets underway. This year’s division features some of the most accomplished surfers in Texas today, including many former Open Shortboard champions like Stefan Lewis, Morgan Faulkner, Shane “Wiggie” Wiggins, and Appling, as well as the up-and-coming Taylor, Harris, and 15-year-old Banyan Smith. The round one quarterfinals knock half of the competitors out, including Appling, Burtero, and Harris. After the semifinals, the surfers gather around the monitor to see their scores. Lewis, who is Taylor’s coach as well as his competitor, lifts the boy up over his head, shouting, “Bro, you’re in the finals!” Only Faulkner, Wiggins, Taylor and Smith remain in the running.
As the finalists enter the water for the Open Longboard and Open Shortboard finals, the horn blows, the green flag goes up, and Faulkner and Smith are the first on a wave. Taylor nabs his first, performing a frontside snap—a sharp turn off the top of the wave—to take the lead. “Wheeew! That little kid shreds!” another judge exclaims.
As a merchant ship passes just hundreds of yards behind them, Smith leaps up, speeding down the line, and performs a floater, skimming on top of the wave’s breaking lip and knocking Taylor into second. Minutes later, the lead changes again as Wiggins races to his right and finishes with an off-the-lip, ricocheting his board off of the whitewater at the top of the wave and then diving down to the sound of hoots from the judges. Next it’s Faulkner, carving up and down the wave’s face and then bursting up out of the wave, suspended in mid-air momentarily before landing upright in the foam. A few minutes later, Wiggins is back on top, bouncing off of the wave breaking in front of him.
With four minutes on the clock and Wiggins still leading, Taylor finds his best wave, bumping Smith out of third place. In a last ditch effort, Faulkner pops up one last time as the horn sounded, but as the wave crumbles down the line in front of him, so do his chances of victory.
With around 100 trophies to hand out and a rising tide threatening the awards table, the ceremony is carried out expeditiously. The Wes Ellsworth Memorial Bell is the last award to be announced. “Taking the bell back for the third year in a row is gonna be Wind and Wave, A Team!” declares Walter Sohl, the TGSA’s competition director.
A young girl calls out to her mother, “Told ya! Told ya!” as the crowd cheers. Faulkner grabs the keychain-sized surfboard dangling below the bell, ringing in the new season for the TGSA.
