It has been a truly memorable year for English surfing so we challenged our CEO Ben Powis to list some of the highlights.
It’s been an amazing 2023 and I’m going to try and summarise our highlights in the next 2 minutes. Starting with talent, where we’ve given away £56,000 worth of grants to young surfers with our partners in sports AID.
We’ve also raised and spent another £75,000 getting our teams out to five international events where they’ve absolutely smashed it this year, winning 14 medals, European and World Championships, three golds, five silvers, two bronze, four coppers, at the para surfing World Games in California, we achieved the historic fourth place beating the likes of Hawaii and Australia really putting English surfing on the map.
Also with Adaptive, we’ve launched the first adaptive Surf hub south southwest in Croyde. We launched the recruitment of an adaptive surfing pathway lead and we’ve launched an adaptive volunteer training program with the Wave project. We also brought English National Adaptive Championships back to the beach.
We ran five national championships and Grom Search in 2023 and we brought bodyboarding back into our nationals. We ran a priory training program for judges and we’ve introduced priority for our open surfers as we really push the boundaries. delivering the Interclubs at the Wave for the first time.
Working with our clubs, we ran the Junior Surf Series – five events and a series final, 250 places for under 14 surfers to come enjoy competitive surfing. We’re really stoked with participation from the girls, which has grown to an extent we’re now oversubscribed in those categories.
We’ve had ten new surf clubs join our affiliated clubs program. We’ve rolled out our Grom Squad junior surfing program and we’re recruiting a new community and welfare lead to specifically work with our clubs and volunteers going into 2024.
We also launched our coaching hub this year, our first ever surf instructor qualification and an online surf safeguarding training program.
We also recruited 18 trainee assessors right across the country to deliver those. We’ve embedded equality, diversity and inclusion into our work. For example, bringing unconscious bias in coaching into our new training awards. And we launched our inclusive line ups committee who are an amazing group, and they are on a mission to support a more diverse line up.
In governance we are on our way to Tier three of a code for sports governance and we’ve been recognised as a sport England assistant partner. This is a massive move forward for us and we’re going to talk about more about what that means in the new Year.
We’ve just launched a new website, we moved office, we’re recruiting for new roles as the team grows and there are three opportunities to join our boards, so lots of opportunities to get involved.
Huge thank you to the team for enabling all this amazing delivery and volunteers that we work with and crucially to our partners, those businesses and brands that put our hands in their pockets to support what we do, please support them because without their support, none of this is possible.
Caravan and Motorhome Club, Korev Lager, Dryrobe, Muscle Food, Decathlon, The Wave, Animal, RYD, Vospers, Rip Curl.
It’s been an epic year. 2024 is going to be even bigger.
We can’t wait to see you there.
