New Shore Regional Surf Team Will Hit the Waves

By Jenna O’Donnell |
WEST LONG BRANCH – A group of Shore Regional students are making waves at their high school and they’ll soon be riding them, too, as part of the school’s newly formed surf team.
Shore Regional High School’s new surf team was approved by the board of education in March and will be up and running this summer and fall, thanks in large part to the organizing and dedication of two student surfers.
“I was so excited,” said freshman Casey Flaherty, of finding out the team was approved.
Months before she started at Shore last year, Flaherty was already working with friends, teachers and parents to establish a surf team. She enlisted her friend, Jake Zimmerman, then a freshman, to help her find a coach and like-minded students to join the team.
Finding interested surfers was easy in a school where most of the students have grown up in towns along or close to the ocean. Before it was made official, the team’s roster already included more than 20 students. The hard part was finding someone to coach them.

“That was one of our biggest problems because the board wasn’t going to approve it if we didn’t have a coach,” said Zimmerman, a sophomore who’s been surfing since fourth grade.
“A lot of teachers were afraid it wouldn’t work out,” Flaherty said. “I don’t think they understood how committed we were to it.”
In the end, all it took was asking the right person. Daniel Nicol, a math teacher and lifelong shore resident with coaching experience in other sports, signed on several months ago. Since then he has helped to organize some of the planning and fundraising that will be needed to get the team ready for the fall competition season.
“Jake and Casey really spearheaded the whole thing,” Nicol said. “They did a lot of the legwork ahead of time even before they asked me if I wanted to coach. They’re really into it.”
Other students have also greeted the surf team with enthusiasm, Nicol said. Upon hearing that he would be the coach, several approached him and asked to join.
“I’m excited,” he said. “Especially with the competition part of it. They have something they’ve done all their life and now they can actually do it on a team basis, which is pretty cool.”
Making surfing an official part of high school sounded good to many students, including Carter Riebe, an incoming freshman who is attending Shore Regional specifically for the new surf team. Though he was accepted to Christian Brothers Academy, Riebe said the decision to head to Shore was a no brainer for him.
“Basically I surf winter, fall, summer and spring,” Riebe said. “I thought to myself it would be cool to have a surf team because I do it so much.”
Riebe, who has been surfing on his own for five years, wants to compete with other high schools like Manasquan and Rumson-Fair Haven Regional to continue to hone his own skills. That competition will also help surfers make a favored hobby and pastime into something more official.
“It’s going to be nice to be able to showcase your surfing for your school and be recognized for it,” Zimmerman said. “It’s another thing to represent your school in competition. A lot of colleges on the coast have teams or clubs, which is definitely something I’d be interested in.”
The team is currently selling T-shirts with their logo to raise the approximately $345 per surfer needed to pay for equipment and lifeguards. Nicol said the team is currently working to find a town willing to permit the use of its beach to host competitions. Practice and conditioning is set to being this summer.

Both Flaherty and Zimmerman are excited to be part of a surfing team that, for them, was years in the making.
“I think it will help everyone to get them all interested in surfing every day,” Flaherty said, adding she was also eager to have a team to surf with in the years ahead. “Being one of the only girls that surf around here, it’s harder finding people to surf with.”
Zimmerman also looked forward to expanding his group of surfers – and hopes they can all learn from one another.
“I’ve never really been part of a team as far as surfing goes,” Zimmerman said. “It’s cool to know that now I’ll have a family that I surf with from school. I’m really excited to be able to say that.”

This article was first published in the June 1-June 8, 2017 print edition of The Two River Times.