Watch: Conner Coffin’s ‘Year One’!

Sophomore powerhouse tells all!

I just finished a multi-part series about the seven incoming rookies and how a majority of them will thrive. This is of course highly unlikely but what is BeachGrit if not a bastion of optimism?

Conner Coffin’s rookie season began with this exact type of positivity. Two solid results at Snapper and Bells placed him at second in the world. A dream run for the Cali kid.

Then horror struck. Five bad results in a row, leading to a downward spiral of negative emotions and existential questions.

Do I even want to compete, or should I just be a soul/free/still paid surfer?

Maybe if I add an extra fin on the toeside rail…

Are these chia seeds even working?

But like any working-class hero Conner picked himself by the bootstraps and rebounded, making the final in Portugal and earning himself a spot on the 2017 Championship Tour. Just like that his year went from heartbreak and disillusion to WSL fuck yeah! 

The thing that stuck out in this movie, besides Conner’s very handy railwork, is surfers’ desire to determine objective reasoning behind their good and bad results. Instead of realizing that competitive surfing is inherently random, considering the biggest piece of the puzzle is the ever-dynamic ocean, surfers attempt to boil results down to petty minutiae like “bad vibes” or a lucky pair of boardshorts.

No.

Good results happen, bad results happen. There can be external forces like your skill set at a certain venue or that elusive serpent called “confidence”, but the only objective way to explain ten consecutive losses is that you surfed worse than your competitors in every half-hour bout. Kelly and Mick win more often because they are better surfers, better competitors than the majority of their opponents.

Meanwhile “streaks” can be one of two things: either a statistical anomaly, or a psychological invention to help humans further categorize, and thus understand, the world around them.

Once this knowledge is accepted, the idea of a losing streak should have no effect on the mind of a professional athlete. A winning streak can help, but only in the sense that the surfer is made to feel like he won’t fall off his board, not that he’ll necessarily win the match.

Got it, Conner Coffin /Julian Wilson / Kolohe / Gab / John / everyonefuckingelse? None of this extra shit plays a role, really. So less thinky, more surfy!