Every year since 2012, the University of North Carolina Wilmington surf team has awarded a scholarship to one of its members for excelling in the waves and the classroom. The 2015 award was recently granted to rising senior Shane Burn, and the $1,500 will go toward the final semesters of his exercise science and biomechanics major.
“Shane represents the best of the surfer scholar athlete,” UNCW surf team coach Dylan McNamara said. “He’s one of the best surfers in the mid-Atlantic region … and he’s very ambitious and driven to become a personal trainer or fitness expert.”
It is a difficult course of study at UNCW, McNamara said.
“You take anatomy and physiology,” he said. “It’s the same crew of people who are going to go to medical school, so Shane is in there amongst all those kids and he’s doing really well. He has a really respectable, high GPA.”
All the surf team members work hard academically, McNamara added. The team’s average GPA every year is above a 3.0.
“Surfing takes dedication,” he said. “It’s kind of an individual sport, it takes a lot of getting up early in the morning, checking conditions, and that kind of drive is the same type of drive that leads to success in college, so I think it’s no coincidence that surfers at UNCW are typically really good students.”
The nine surf team members find a way to stay on top of schoolwork, McNamara said, despite balancing academics with surf team commitments. They don’t schedule regular practices, because often the ocean will go flat for weeks, but the team travels to regional competitions every year. And their dominance in the regional championships — winning first place six out of the last seven years — has earned them multiple trips across the country to compete in nationals.
Burn said he mostly keeps up with his studies during surf trips by getting assignments done ahead of time.
“But I definitely bring some of the stuff on the road with me,” Burn added.
While the team competitions are typically held in Florida or California, McNamara said many of the surfers travel individually to more exotic locations to push the level of their surfing, and that exposure to different cultures develops their character.
“They’ve been to Hawaii, they’ve been to the Caribbean, they’ve been to Indonesia, they’ve been to Australia, and when you travel like that you learn a lot,” he said. “I think they come into college a bit more mature than the typical college students.”
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