On the sand, they grew up a tight-knit group of friends, but in the sea, they are fierce competitors fighting for their dream to be the world’s top pro surfers.
Five San Clemente surfers – four men and one woman – have qualified for the elite 2024 World Surf League Championship Tour, the major league of the sport made up of the top 36 men and 17 women competitors.
Never before in pro surfing’s 50-year history have so many surfers from the same surf town qualified for the World Tour at the same time, marking a major moment for not just San Clemente, but Southern California and mainland U.S.A.
The surfers – brothers Griffin and Crosby Colapinto, Cole Houshmand, Kade Matson and Sawyer Lindblad – are heading to Hawaii in coming weeks to prepare for the Billabong Pro Pipeline, the first stop on the WSL’s World Tour.
But before taking off to spend the year traveling the globe, the five surfers stopped on the sand under the wooden pier of their beloved hometown on a recent day to talk about what the journey means to them, how it feels to fulfill their life dream along with their best friends and what helped them get to this pivotal moment in their competitive careers.
Perhaps the best person to shed light on their younger years is Mitch Colapinto, father of Griffin and Crosby, who watched all the surfers compete against each other – and form strong friendships – when they were elementary-age kids.
The rule for his two sons, which reverberated with the rest of them: If you lose and are knocked out of the contest, always stick around to support your friends.
“A lot of parents would get upset, storm off the beach, or the kids would storm off the beach,” Mitch Colapinto said. “You have to stay, you have to support your friends. Some of our best times were staying and cheering on our friends. We made so many great friends in the surf community, it became part of our culture.”
What kind of fatherly advice does Colapinto, a teacher and surf instructor, have for his sons and the entire group as they go off to compete at surf breaks around the world?
“Just have fun,” he said. “That’s one of the reasons the kids are all doing so well – it’s a combination of working hard and having fun.”
That’s the secret sauce Griffin Colapinto, the eldest of the group at age 25, has figured out and is passing on to the rest of the surfers. Colapinto, who joined the World Tour at age 19 in 2017, was one of the five who made it to the finals in September, coming just shy of a world championship title.
“We just love what we do and we surf so much, we’re all best friends,” he said. “It’s inevitable we were going to be on tour together.”
It won’t always be easy, he’s warned the others.
Colapinto is kind of like their surfing guru, helping the rookies with how to face emotions when heats don’t go their way or they feel the pressure of the world watching.
They all are doing something few pro athletes have traditionally done: Speak openly about mental health.
They write openly on social media about their ups and downs. They go on meditation retreats and write in journals to process the wave of emotions that come with being an elite athlete. After loses, they share their struggles, their disappointments and their learning lessons.
Griffin and Crosby Colapinto, known as the Cola bros, have recently started selling journals on their website thecolabros.com, with proceeds going to the nonprofit To Write Love On Her Arm, which focuses on mental health.
“I feel like I’m a pretty happy person all the time, but I still have days where I feel really off and I’m not myself,” said Griffin Colapinto, who is healing from hip surgery. “I just realize anything I learn that helps me become a better person … I’d rather share it than keep it a secret.”
World titles are cool and all, he said, but if you can make someone’s life better, that’s probably more important.
Brother Crosby Colapinto, 22, said one day a few years back he asked his big bro if he had what it took to be one of the world’s best.
The answer was blunt but necessary: You need to work harder.
“I realized I had a lot of work to do and hearing it from him, and having Griffin be my realist, hearing what to work on and just listening to him was the biggest thing for me,” Crosby Colapinto recalled.
Fast forward to today and Colapinto, who took the brotherly advice to heart, is heading out on the World Tour to travel with – and compete against – his big brother.
Friend and World Tour newcomer Kade Matson, 21, knows being mentally strong is as important as physical strength.
Last year, Matson was in so much pain he needed back surgery, an injury that kept him out of the water for 10 months. His sponsor dropped him and his dreams of making the World Tour were slipping away.
“All this stuff was coming down on me. I was so bummed,” Matson said, but added, “Mentally, I was able to keep myself in a place where I was seeing the future in a bright way.”
Houshmand was the first one to qualify for the next tour back in August during the US Open of Surfing in Huntington Beach, getting to celebrate in the following months each time a friend made the cut. While he’s enjoyed the break, it’s time to get back to business, he said.
“I’m just ready to get back in the jersey,” Houshmand said. “It’s settling in. The big leagues are starting soon.”
At 6-foot-3, 220 pounds, Houshmand is one of the biggest surfers on tour. While he also grew up playing baseball and soccer, it was surfing that lured him in.
“I didn’t chase money, I chased the love of the sport,” he said. “Being in the ocean and knowing every time you go surf, something different is going to happen – the unknown aspect of it drew me to it.”
It was right there at the San Clemente Pier, where they reminisced about their younger years on a recent day, he remembers doing his first surf contest with this same crew in the town they love.
“I just want to say thanks for all the support from everyone in San Clemente,” he said. “We are just going to try and make our town proud.”
Peer pressure could give them the edge they need, said Peter “PT” Townend, surfing’s first world champion who in the ’70s was part of the “Bronze Aussies,” who along with a group of South African surfers, showed up on the North Shore to compete.
“The Hawaiians were way more experienced, but we had such peer pressure from within our own group, we rose above it,” Townend said. “If one of them does well, the others are going to do well. The pressure of their hometown peers, that’s what happened with us.”
Among the group is the lone San Clemente women’s surfer Sawyer Lindblad, 18, who grew up at the same surf contests as her male counterparts.
While last year’s world champion Caroline Marks lives in San Clemente, she was raised in Florida and still considers the East Coast home.
Lindblad, who won the US Open of Surfing in August, is part of a rising tide of female surfers who are pushing limits.
“I hope that I, along with the other girls on tour, get to inspire young girls to go out there and surf,” she said. “It’s pretty crazy to think young girls are looking up to me; it’s pretty crazy that I’ll be on tour with my role models.”
What advice would she give the young girls?
“Go out there and have fun,” she said. “Don’t try and compete with the other girls, bring each other up.”
That’s how she, and all the San Clemente surfers, got to where they are now, she said.
“It’s really cool that there’s going to be five people on tour from San Clemente,” she said. “We live in such a small town, so it’s pretty remarkable that we all made it to the highest possible level in surfing. I feel like we all push each other.”
