With the WSL announcing its schedule for 2025 earlier this week, commissioner Jessi Miley-Dyer will have her hands full as she manages and helps navigate the world’s best male and female surfers around the globe for 12 different events next season.

We thought this was the perfect time to take a deeper dive into exactly who Jessi is by releasing, for free, a feature that ran in Issue 580 of our mag. The piece takes a deeper dive into the life of Jessi during the 2021 CT; a time when the Australian was working as the WSL’s Head of Competition and Senior Vice President of Tours and was helping to put together a make shift tour as Covid restrictions reaped havoc on regular scheduling.

Since then, Jessi has become the WSL commissioner and has continually been a voice and motivator in helping to elevate the standard of women’s professional surfing.

Check out the feature below. Written by Kate Allman.

Courtney Conlogue is rock-climbing the door and window frames of her quarantine hotel room in Sydney. Elsewhere in the building, Italo Ferreira films a bodyweight workout for his Instagram page, featuring explosive push-ups, backflips, and those trademark washboard abs. Jack Robinson shaves his head and Griffin Colapinto spruiks Vegemite in a wacky Californian drawl.

Welcome to the World Surf League (WSL) Championship Tour in 2021. Or, as Head of Competition and Senior Vice President of Tours Jessi Miley-Dyer more accurately describes it, ‘the travelling circus’.

“Everyone calls it the travelling circus,” she laughs. “It’s a bit like being on summer camp or something.”

If it’s a circus, Australian born Jessi is the ringleader. And she has not been afraid to step in the ring with lions to get it moving.

First, she convinced the steely Australian Government to prise open its borders

for 54 international surfers, plus at least the same number of administration staff and supporters. She chartered a flight to transport them to one of the only COVID- free islands in the world during the global pandemic.

Next, she led the circus through two weeks of hotel quarantine in Sydney, hauling in spin bikes, weights and even Rubik’s cubes to keep them occupied. The sometimes stir- crazy athletes managed it with few hiccups, and in remarkably good spirits. No public tantrums the likes of which came from some tennis players’ rooms as they quarantined for the Australian Open.

“We recognised it’s a big sacrifice for the surfers to come out here and spend two weeks in a hotel room by themselves. At the same time, it’s amazing that Australia and the NSW government let us in,” admits Jessi.

“I held a daily Zoom call to check-in with everyone, inviting a bunch of our executives from America, making sure we were all staying connected. People were sharing what they ate for lunch and doing yoga classes and workout challenges on Instagram. Italo was doing these crazy workout challenges…

I wasn’t very good at them…”

After pulling off professional surfer quarantine en masse, Jessi had to oversee staging four events in different locations around Australia. Three so far – Newcastle, Narrabeen and the Margaret River – have been successes and at the time
of writing, the final event at Western Australia’s Rottnest Island is standing up to expectations like a friendly quokka.

What’s more, she has managed all of it in the first two months of a new job, after being promoted to Head of Competition for the WSL in March. She had big flip flops to fill when she stepped into the role previously held by much-loved former surfer and Championship Tour veteran Pat O’Connell.

“It has been a lot of work and a really big deal for me to take it on this year,” she tells Tracks over a phone call during a rare free evening on the Australian east coast leg of theTour.

“Quarantine felt like my first real event to organise – the charter flight, leading all the surfers here, having everyone quarantine for two weeks in a foreign country, it was a huge thing to take on. But of course, really rewarding.”

From the sands of Sydney’s eastern suburbs to the WSL head office on the shores of Santa Monica: Jessi has come a long way since she began paddling out as the only girl in an all-male lineup at her home break in Bronte almost three decades ago. Jessi was a Champion Junior Lifeguard and surf-boat racer who became hooked on surfing thanks to her aunt, who owned iconic Bondi surf school Let’s Go Surfing.

It wasn’t until her early teens that Jessi was joined by Nicola Atherton in the lineup at Bronte. The two groms became friends, later competing on the Championship Tour together in the early 2000s.

In 2000, her dimpled grin and sun- bleached blonde hair made a splash on international TV when she was asked to loft the Olympic torch above her head on a surf boat sailing into Bondi Beach, representing Surf Lifesaving Australia. Two decades later, it seems like her own ship has finally come in.

Her journey up the rungs of the WSL’s business is symbolic of the dawning of a new era for gender equality and inclusion in surfing. She is the first woman to hold such a senior role at the WSL, one year after the league adopted equal prize money for both genders at the beginning of 2020.

She was the first-ever Women’s Tour manager when she retired from professional surfing at 25. She also knows what it’s like to be in the trenches with the athletes campaigning for equal treatment: she spent 10 years as a professional surfer and six of those on the Championship Tour. She took on the role of Surfer’s Representative and was an ASP Board Member and Director before the WSL took over.

“[Jessi] has been at the heart of our biggest equality efffforts, including equal prize money, increasing the number of women’s CT events, and improving the locations and competition conditions,” said WSL CEO Erik Logan when he announced her promotion in March.

Seven-time WSL Champion Stephanie Gilmore commented on the symbolism of promoting a woman at that moment, calling it “transformative and inspiring” for future generations.

Two-time WSL Champion Tyler Wright gave Jessi perhaps the biggest ups of all, when she passed the mic on this very magazine feature by recommending Tracks seek an interview with the new WSL Head of Tours rather than herself, the comeback

“Tell ya who you should interview, you should interview Jessi Miley-Dyer. That woman is so impressive, she’s the queen of everything,” Wright told Tracks candidly.

Jessi’s biggest triumph to date came in 2019, when WSL announced it would distribute equal prize money to men and women surfers starting in 2020. The phone line goes silent when Tracks poses a question reflecting on the gravity of it all.

“When I was younger – even when I was surfing on the Championship Tour – if anyone had ever told me that surfing would become this leader for gender equality globally, and that we would see a bunch of things like equal prize money … I would never have thought that would be the case,” she says.

“It was one of those things that you strive for. To see the equal pay happen was pretty big. It was a big deal for a lot of people. I’m more proud to have worked for that and to have seen that happen, than anything that I ever did when I was competing.”

For Jessi, like many men and women in surfing, the ripple effect of such momentous and positive change in recent years has been to ask – well, what next?

Jessi campaigned for women to surf at Pipeline alongside the men, and made it happen in December 2020, when Tyler Wright came up trumps on her return to professional surfing in a monster eight-foot. swell. Jessi has also been pushing for a long time to return Teahupo’o to the Women’s Tour. When the women paddle out at a WSL event slated to be held at the world’s heaviest wave in August 2021, it will be for the first time in 15 years.

First, she plans to guide her travelling circus to the Kelly Slater-built Surf Ranch in California. Mexico, Teahupo’o and Trestles will come next, if all goes to plan. These events still seem like pipe dreams as countries around the world grapple with new variants of coronavirus. But Jessi is adamant that her team will figure out a way to manoeuvre around whatever challenge arises.

“This sounds dumb, but I’m quite passionate about the idea that failure is an option. As individuals in life, we have to take into account that we may not succeed at something,” she says. She admits she is intimately acquainted with disappointment, after tearing her ACL heralded her retirement from professional surfing.

“If we learned anything from the past year, it’s definitely that challenges arise and something is likely to come up that we’re not aware of yet. But we’re gonna do our best. We’ll be ready.”