When senior Craig Schallhorn walks at graduation this spring and leaves UCLA, he will leave a tangible contribution behind him.
Younger surfers have him to thank for the UCLA surf team that now exists on campus, and it will be their job to carry it on.
For the past five years, the whole of Schallhorn’s UCLA career, the university has been without a surf organization. The last surf team was not regularly publicized and died out when the original founders graduated, leaving no one to carry on the tradition.
This year Schallhorn decided that he wanted to rebuild the surf community at UCLA.
“This year we just kind of got the word out there, met a lot of new young guys that are going to take over next year when us old guys are out,” Schallhorn said.
This outreach and initiative helped people like freshman Mark Harrington get involved in something at UCLA.
“I kind of researched the team before I came,” Harrington said. “Those guys that did something in the past went on study abroad. I just randomly met one of the guys at a party and started a conversation.”
The team competes with other West Coast schools in the National Scholastic Surfing Association, a long-established league for amateur surfers.
Schallhorn said that competing in NSSA events is gratifying for him and his teammates.
“It’s nice to get out there with your friends, wear your colors and do the thing that you love to do.”
This year the team placed in the top two-thirds of the league, which it considered good for its first year.
Team members said the biggest challenge for the individual surfers is getting access to a beach where they can surf. UCLA is so centrally located that the only way to successfully and consistently make it to a beach to surf is to drive. This is one of the main reasons that Schallhorn wanted to start a team in the first place.
“Coming to L.A., you really need to have a car to get around, which is why a community kind of needed to be developed around it,” Schallhorn said. “Younger guys don’t have access to a car.
“When I first got here, before I met anybody with a car, I rode the bus there and back. I grabbed my board and jumped on the bus.”
This individual challenge gives the team some disadvantage in the NSSA since several of the competing schools like UCSB and UCSD are located much closer to the beach.
The fledgling team also hopes to improve its funding next year by improving its organization. Other schools have had programs for years and are more well-established as a result.
“They have the leg up in terms of already having the program established. Some of the teams even have a coach that they hire on,” Schallhorn said.
“Being our first year, we are fighting club sports to get money, trying to legitimately establish ourselves. In terms of resources we are new, we haven’t organized it best, and there is still a lot we can do.”
Harrington has similar goals for the team, in particular promoting the team’s campus visibility.
“I’d like to get a better name established on campus,” Harrington said. “I’ll be talking to someone on campus and say, “˜I’m on the surf team’ and they’ll be like, “˜I didn’t even know we had a surf team.’ Getting the word out about it is crucial.”
Yet despite all the work that remains to be done and the inherent disadvantages UCLA faces, the members of the team say they are committed to their sport. They continue to make the trek out to the beaches and set up their schedules to allow them to surf. They always try to start classes late to allow themselves optimal surfing time.
“If I have an 11:00 a.m. class I can still drive out to Ventura and back before class and get just as good as quality waves as someone on the beach,” Harrington said.