This December, seven UNCW surfers will travel south to ride the massive waves on Oahu’s north shore—and the trip is free.
Shane Burn, Justin Parr, Dylan Domnick, Zach Valenti, Michael Casper, Evan Barton and Jacob Laham earned plane tickets and lodging by beating seven other collegiate surf teams from around the country in a bracket-style surf video contest organized by Red Bull.
The eight teams created videos showcasing their surfing and local surf breaks and during each round the public voted on who advanced. UNCW beat University of Southern California in the first round, University of California San Diego in the second round and bested Monmouth University in the championship.
Burn said he wasn’t overly optimistic about his team’s chances because the schools they were going up against were so much larger than UNCW. USC has a student body triple that of UNCW, he said, and the California and Hawaii schools also benefit from better local surf.
Despite that, the UNCW Frothers Surf Club created a video montage mixing footage of Wrightsville and Carolina Beach with clips of Burn and Barton riding 15-foot barreling waves on a recent trip to Mexico, and the local surf community voted them through the first round.
While they made their first-round video submission well ahead of time, their second and third round montages were created in a single day. Still, they strove to get creative shots that involved Laham, the project’s cinematographer, surfing and filming at the same time.
“He was following me on another surfboard,” Burn said. “He was literally right behind me when I was surfing and that’s not easy, but it’s a really cool angle.”
For winning the contest, the UNCW surfers earned plane tickets to Hawaii and lodging for five days. But as long as they’re getting free tickets to surfing’s epicenter, they plan to stay for as much of their winter holiday as they can, Burn said. They’re going to camp for a few more weeks, watch the best surfers in the world compete in the Pipe Masters and maybe even paddle out at the infamous Banzai Pipeline themselves.
“That will definitely be something we’ll never forget,” Burn said.
