It’s Monday morning and you’re paddling your old sack of bones into the first wave of your session. You get stuffed by a 12-year-old with six different stickers on his board. Eighteen of his friends howl with laughter as they synchronise a succession of air reverses above your head. You check your watch. It’s 10:00 AM. Whatever happened to school?
Either one of two voices will arise in your head: 1. The cynic, who’s convinced the youth have gone soft, the world’s lost its order, and the Kingscliff Library will forever be stocked with nothing but pool boy romance novels. Or 2. The poet, who knows there is no purer teenage daydream come true than to be surfing instead of in class. If there’s such a thing as a new dawn of enlightenment, it looks like it’s beaming into the retinas of Gen Alpha.
It’s not a new occurrence that young pros are adapting their academic obligations to fit their professional life. Plenty of pros have gone full-homeschool (Griffin Colapinto, Bethany Hamilton, Kolohe Andino, etc.). But since Covid, when remoteness became normalised for all, the pool of young hustlers has expanded; kids who are a far cry from CT level potential have little to lose in at least giving it a crack, seeing as switching to some type of distance learning is now a lot more feasible.
16-year-old Ziggy Mackenzie (2024 ISA U16 World Junior Champ, 2025 Burleigh Single Fin Winner) is a top-tier competitor who has run the gamut of schooling styles while coming up on the QS. Before she made the move to the Gold Coast last year from Uluwatu, she was scooting around the Bukit Peninsula with a tight crew of surf friends on a similar routine to hers. Maybe it was from learning to navigate the chaos of Indo in childhood, but Ziggy has always had a poise that suggests maturity beyond her age.
“I was doing online school, and it was really independent. It was just three hours a day, but you had to actually commit to doing the work, which was hard for me because I feel like there’s always people in Bali to see and things to do. Nobody wants to do schoolwork in Bali.”
Upon moving to Australia, her routine took a big shift. Ziggy spent her first year at a full-time public school of 3,000 students, but soon she was looking for an educational option more aligned with her surfing ambitions. “As of the last few weeks, I’m now at a school called Cooee, which is a surf program. There are maybe forty of us kids in the whole grades eleven and twelve. We surf Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday from six to eight every morning. And then on Thursdays, you kind of do your own thing in the mornings – surf where you want to and then go to school from nine until one. We don’t go to school on Fridays because you’re supposed to do your traineeship then. But most of us do that during school days, so you can take a day off.”
“But as for the year at the big public school, I wouldn’t have changed it all,” she adds. “They were still really good at accommodating my schedule, even though it’s a lot more challenging dealing with that many kids.” She wagers it could get tricky to be on the CT while attending a full-time public school, but these regional surf-hub Australian schools seem to have enough experience to have things pretty dialled in. They have an elite sports-person exemption form that makes room for competition time and training days.
Kirtsy Shaw-Zoric of Broken Head, mother of Leihani Zoric (age 12, currently training with the Surfing Australia Olympic pathway), weighs in from the perspective of a parent who’s had their own rich-historied surfing life. Leihani, also a top competitor in her age bracket, is the only girl in the Surfing Australia Talent Identification Program who goes to school full-time – everyone else is homeschooled or distance ed.
“We’re very big on school,” Kirsty says. “So many kids don’t go anymore. It’s definitely changed. I feel like a lot more kids have left school after Covid because they got used to being at home and they probably thought it was great. And they were getting more time in the water. I can totally understand why a lot of families do it. But I guess it just depends on the individual. I feel like you want to play the long game, not the short game. And I don’t want Leihani to be burnt out by the time she’s 16 and probably at her prime for getting on tour.
“You can never get your childhood back,” Kirsty adds. “Surfing is fantastic and it’s an awesome thing to aspire to, but I’ve always said to Leihani that unless you’re actually getting paid, I don’t see the need to quit school so young. Look at Carissa, Mick Fanning, Steph – they went to school, and they’ve been super successful.”
Christian Beserra, C.O.O. of the WPS, is the man responsible for repping the interests of the CT surfers. Kind of like a cool, union boss for surfers. “A main mission of WPS itself is to create a path for them to transition from the dream tour to the nightmare of life,” he half-jokes.
His perspective is unique in how he gets to witness what that process actually looks like when it finally happens. When competing can no longer be the central focus of someone’s life after so many decades of pulling on a singlet, it can be confusing. “I want to give them some awareness and understanding of how much they’ve learned from this life they’ve had,” explains Christian. Some of them leave the tour thinking, ‘Oh my God, I saved no money, I have no other skills. What do I do now?’. Because it’s not the same anymore – most surfers can’t just retire from the CT with enough money.”
“Some of them naturally can speak in front of the cameras. And in some of the meetings that we have — they’re almost like corporate meetings where we talk business — they use very sophisticated language and they’re incredible. A lot of them are way better than a lot of people who have degrees in this, because it’s like more real-world experience versus conceptual. You can get philosophical about how the world has changed in the past ten years alone, let alone the past thirty, right? The way we solve problems these days is different compared to ten years ago, even five years ago. And the way the curriculums are designed at schools — I mean, today, I was actually going through the math for my 13-year-old. It’s the same. It has been the same for centuries, you know?”
It’s perhaps de riguer to say that the structure of traditional education no longer holds a monopoly over our lifestyles. But, without pontificating about the ethos of surfing, the real question on everyone’s lips is this: are we getting smarter or dumber? That will depend on which side of the bed you wake up on in the morning. If your morning coffee is proceeded by a session with a gaggle of 12-year-old rippers who’ve already figured out how to balance school, sponsorship deals, social media management, and sunrise interval training then maybe ‘The Kids are Alright’.
