WHAT IT TAKES BY Mark Rady

Been surfing lately? Especially at your local surfing haunt and noticed the standard of your local Grom surf terrorist, every beach has one or two. Like fire ants at a BBQ , and the energy of 10 red bull’s, they can totally out surf, out hassle, out paddle and style you, even on your best day, and all harbour a secret desire to be the next Mick Fanning or Kelly Slater, and regularly demonstrate massive scale wave vandalism and rack up huge wave tally’s on any given day.

But these micro surf machines that share the line up with you every day, did not reach this standard of froth or wave destruction by accident, it’s now all mostly by design, hard work, coaching and single minded focus, rather than do it the old way, wag school and surf all day.

These days talent or surf time is not enough to make a champion, it takes practice, planning, hard work, single minded determination, great support base and a shit load of money . And this is where a desire, money, sponsorship and a great support base come in, and out of all this Grom Coaching and “ The Grom Camp” has evolved.

More than ever our surfing elite are turning to the professional surfing Coach for that extra edge needed to win or find that advantage they are all looking for. Most Coach’s themselves were once on the same Surfing Circus with varying degrees of success, that all these kids so dearly want to join.

The Elite Coaching Fraternity know all to well the pro’s and cons of the road to surfing stardom, and are happy to offer up this advice to any aspiring over achieving froth monster Grom, but for a price. And after all this is a now highly competitive professional sport which incredibly, love or hate it is almost now corporately run by all the major surf labels.

The Grom Camp and the elite Surf Coach have evolved by need rather than desire, and are all looking for the next Mick or Taj and give that much needed edge to their endless stream of super keen Groms eager to take up the challenge and further their surfing skills.

Take ES (Elite Surfing) Grom Camps, run by Avalon’s Hamish Nelson and Newcastle’s former WQS surfer and Surf Coach Dan Frodsham now offering elite Groms, intense surf training weekends away surf camps. Their camps take groms through every facet of surfing or rather the road to a possible pro career.

ES like a multitude of other similar Surf Schools, carry out a Varity of drills, fitness, completion and competition tips. And according to one grom “they bloody torture us, but its sick fun”. Each young surfer comes away from the camps with a knowledge and understanding of what it will take to be a champion or surf or compete better.

Surf camps are not new, and the guru of surf camps surf coach Martin Dunn now the National HPC Coach has been running them from his former home at Old bar for years, and has coached hundreds of World Class Groms from all over the world, but it’s the level of professionalism that has evolved, yoga instructors, fitness gurus, Video analysis, Dietitians and great locations are now the norm and are all on offer at most Elite Grom Camps.

Thus was the case for six lucky elite groms recently attending an ES camp at Blacksmiths Beach, Ryan Callahan, Jake Sylvester, Josh Radford, Jack Scollard, Ryan Hunt and Isaac Austin all put through their paces and all coming away with a new sense of professionalism and purpose

So next time a local young shredder towels you up, know he worked his arse off and it cost his oldies a fortune to reach this standard of froth.

special thanks Joshua Weaver for photos.