MEET THE TEAM

Meet the Team Building WPSL

Every new sport starts the same way: with a small group of people who believe in something before anyone else does. WPSL — the Wave Pool Surf League — is no different. Behind the wave pools, the format, and the countdown to WPSL1 at Adrena, Saudi Arabia in October 2027, is a team that's spent decades in surfing, sport, business, and entertainment, now building something none of them could have built alone.

Here's who's behind WPSL, and what they bring to it.

Justin West — Founder & CEO

Justin has spent 20+ years coaching surfers, from complete beginners to WQS/CT-level athletes, across Portugal, the UK, Senegal, Switzerland, Madagascar, and the Maldives. But WPSL didn't come out of coaching alone. Justin has also been a partner in a travel company running an ocean-going exploration catamaran in the Maldives, co-owned a surf resort in Madagascar, and held a stake in a security company operating in the Middle East — building and running teams in remote, high-pressure environments long before WPSL existed. He's also an IBJJF European Masters Jiu-Jitsu gold medallist, and that same strategic, patient mindset shows up in how he runs the league. Justin leads by example rather than dictation.

Dan Luger MBE — Co-Founder & Chairman

Dan is a Rugby World Cup winner, part of England's 2003 World Cup-winning squad and that year's Six Nations Grand Slam, and one of England's highest-ever try scorers with 24 tries in 38 caps. He came to surfing later than most of the team, but he's brought the same relentless drive that made him one of the most feared wingers in world rugby. At WPSL, Dan is our Chairman — the glue that holds this team together — and heads up investor relations across the Middle East and worldwide.

Barton Lynch — Ambassador & Commentator

Barton is the 1988 World Champion, a title he clinched at Pipeline in one of the most dramatic finals competitive surfing has ever seen. He's also one of the first people to put his name behind WPSL, a founding stakeholder in what this league is trying to build. As WPSL grows, Barton will lead the commentary team, help design the competition format, and lead surfing integrity across the league. In his own words: we're obliged to tell the story of surfing's culture and history to a new generation of surfers who may grow up far from the ocean where it all began.

Jamie Mitchell — Athlete Ambassador & Contest Format Designer

Jamie is a 10-time Molokai to Oahu World Champion and an Eddie Aikau Big Wave Invitational regular, with a big wave surfing career spanning Jaws, Nazaré, and some of the heaviest breaks on the planet. Few athletes in the sport's history have tested themselves across as many disciplines. At WPSL, Jamie brings a waterman's read on wave craft, endurance, and competition into how our events are actually designed.

Natalie Waddell — Strategic Communications

Natalie's career has been built inside some of the biggest brands in music and sport: Sony Music, Chelsea FC, adidas, and Universal Music Group. She's spent it turning huge organisations into brands people feel something for. At WPSL, Natalie leads Strategic Communications, shaping how the league tells its story to fans, sponsors, and partners around the world.

Pedro Guerreiro — Director of Finance & Operations

Pedro is an economist and quantitative analyst who built his career in financial forecasting and operational planning, including time inside Red Bull's event operations and marketing programmes across international markets. He's also an experienced Jiu-Jitsu practitioner — a calculated competitor, already several moves ahead of his training partners, and that same instinct shapes how he approaches WPSL's numbers. Pedro leads financial planning, budgeting, and the operational infrastructure that turns a big idea into an investable, scalable league.

Michele Ciuti — Strategic & Project Advisor

Michele has spent his career in brand partnerships and business development, working across global names including BIRKENSTOCK and On. At WPSL, he advises on strategic partnerships, project management, and brand relationships, connecting the league with commercial partners, venues, and growth opportunities worldwide.

Maryam Shams — Director of Partnerships

Maryam is a growth and partnerships executive with international experience across startups, media, and global business communities, known for building trusted relationships across cultures and markets. At WPSL, she's our Director of Partnerships, connecting the league with the brands, venues, and communities that will carry it around the world.

What's Next?

With the founding team in place, our next big hire is an event management team — the specialists who will plan and execute WPSL1 at Adrena, Saudi Arabia. If that's you, or someone you know, we'd love to talk.

WPSL — Wave Pool Surf League wpsl.live

Photo: 3 x World Champion surfer and wave pool investor Mick Fanning

The Noise Problem: Why the Best Opportunities Rarely Shout the Loudest

There is a version of the surf industry that has not been touched in thirty years. One league, one format, one way of doing things — built for a different era of media, a different generation of fans, and a surfing audience that increasingly cannot separate "world tour" from "who?"

That kind of stillness is usually where the biggest opportunities are hiding. Not because nobody has noticed — but because building the alternative properly takes more than an idea and a pitch deck. It takes a team, a structure, and, eventually, capital.

Which brings me to a question I have been turning over for months, one I suspect every founder eventually asks: how do you find the right capital, rather than just the loudest capital?

Building in a market that has been left alone

Wave Pool Surf League (WPSL) is the business I have spent the last year building — the world's first global, arena-based wave pool surf competition and festival series. Our flagship event, WPSL1 Saudi Arabia, launches in October 2027 as the permanent home of an annual World Championship Final, with further events across Brazil, the USA, Australia, Europe, China and South Korea to follow through 2028 and 2029.

The thesis is simple. Surfing is a $70bn-plus global industry, forecast to keep growing steadily this decade, and there are now over 200 wave pools built or under planned construction worldwide — venues built for exactly this kind of controllable, broadcastable, arena-scale competition. Nobody has built the league to fill them. The incumbent tour was designed for ocean conditions, closed judging panels, and a broadcast model that predates the smartphone. We built WPSL to solve for the opposite: mixed-gender open heats under one World Champion title, no paddle-in requirement (which opens up entirely new equipment and board design possibilities), and People Power™ — our own judging and broadcast layer that blends AI technical scoring with live fan voting, shown on screen in real time.

None of that is a slide in a deck. It is already built, tested, and being integrated ahead of WPSL1.

The team, not just the idea

I am fairly convinced that ideas are cheap and teams are not, so here is who is actually building this:

• Dan Luger MBE — Co-Founder & Chairman, Rugby World Cup winner, leading investor relations and capital raising as an equal co-founder

• Barton Lynch — 1988 ASP World Champion, our commentary lead and surf ambassador

• Jamie Mitchell — ten-time Molokai to Oahu Paddleboard World Champion and Nazaré Big Wave Champion, athlete ambassador

• Maryam Shams — COO & Head of Partnerships

• Natalie Waddell — Strategic Communications, with a background across Universal Music Group, adidas and Chelsea FC

• Michele Ciuti — Strategic Advisor, formerly with On and Birkenstock

• Pedro Guerreiro — Director of Finance & Operations

We already have athletes who believe in this enough to hold equity in it, not just appearance fees. We have a confirmed global media partner in Fuel.TV, reaching 4.27 billion people across 80-plus platforms in 11 languages. We have an event management structure and a shortlist of sponsors actively engaged. This is not a napkin sketch looking for validation. It is a business looking for the right next layer of support.

Why "more eyes" is not the same as "the right eyes"

Here is the strange thing about building something real: the validation arrives quietly. We have not launched publicly yet, and I have already had more than two dozen relevant profiles view mine on LinkedIn in the last few weeks — people from investment banking, sports rights, and sponsorship backgrounds, without a single outbound message sent to most of them. Word moves through the right networks before it ever needs a press release.

Which makes me wonder how many genuinely strong opportunities never get that quiet attention at all — because they are drowned out by louder, better-marketed businesses with less underneath them. Volume and noise are cheap to produce. Depth is not. And most investors who have been burned once know the difference the second time.

The founders I respect most are not the ones who raised the fastest. They are the ones who were patient enough to wait for backers who understood the sector, could open doors, and would still be useful eighteen months after the wire transfer landed.

What we are actually looking for

So here is the honest version of the question, rather than the polite one: we are not chasing capital for its own sake — we are trying to work out how you reliably find investors who bring something beyond the cheque. Distribution relationships. Category credibility. A network that turns a warm introduction into a signed partner. Governance experience that helps a young league scale without breaking itself.

If you have raised a seed or Series A round recently and found a way to filter for that kind of investor rather than just the fastest one, I would genuinely like to compare notes. And if this sounds like the kind of proposition you would want to be closer to — whether as an investor, an operator, or simply someone with the right introduction to make — I would rather have that conversation properly than shout about it here.

Justin West is Founder & CEO of WPSL (Wave Pool Surf League), a global arena-based surf competition series launching with WPSL1 Saudi Arabia, in October 2027.

Photography: Marcus Paladino

Why We Built Open Heats: Removing Prejudice from How We Judge Surfing.

At WPSL, we are often asked why we plan to run open heats, putting men and women in the water together, scored by the same criteria, competing for the same prize purse from day one. The honest answer is that surfing's judging system has never really been neutral, and we think it is time somebody said so.

A Young Kind of Equality

Surfing likes to think of itself as progressive. In some ways it is. The World Surf League announced equal prize money for male and female athletes across its controlled events from the 2019 season, becoming the first major US-based global sports league to do so. That is a genuine milestone, and the athletes who fought for it deserve enormous credit.

But it is worth sitting with how recent that milestone actually is. Less than a decade ago, the best female surfers in the world were still competing for smaller cheques than the men, in the same events, on the same tour. And pay parity, important as it is, does not by itself fix the deeper issue: how the sport decides what "good" surfing looks like in the first place.

Even after prize money was equalised, scheduling controversies kept surfacing. Women's heats have repeatedly been run in conditions widely regarded as inferior to the men's - smaller, messier, less rideable swells - while the best waves of a waiting period went to the men's draw. Fans, athletes and commentators have called this out publicly, year after year, at some of the sport's most high-profile venues. The pattern is well documented enough that it can no longer be dismissed as coincidence.

The effect of that pattern is corrosive, and it goes beyond fairness on any single day. When women are repeatedly shown to the world in lesser waves, audiences absorb a quiet lesson: that women's surfing is somehow a lesser version of the real thing. Nobody has to say it out loud. The scheduling says it for them.

Judging Is Never as Neutral as It Looks

Traditional surf judging asks a panel of humans to award a score out of ten based on criteria like commitment, degree of difficulty, and flow. It sounds objective. It rarely is. Judges are human, and humans form preferences - for a style, a story, a favourite, an underdog. That is not a scandal. It is simply what happens when subjective judgement is applied to sport. But it has never been openly acknowledged as a factor in how surfing scores its athletes, least of all across gender lines.

At WPSL, our approach starts from a different question. If good surfing has a bias baked into it, the fix is not to ask judges to try harder to be fair. The fix is to change what is being measured, and who is doing the measuring.

People Power™: Data First, Then the Human Voice

Our proprietary judging system, People Power™, works in two layers.

The first layer is purely analytical. An AI system reads each wave in real time - wave height, amplitude and tightness of turn, positioning in the pocket, height and rotation of airs, and speed carried between manoeuvre sections. It produces a technical score out of ten, and it can show its working: an on-screen overlay on the replay, breaking down exactly why the wave scored the way it did. There is no panel to please, no reputation to protect, no history with a rider that colours the number.

The second layer is human, and we think it should be. Our commentary team, led by 1988 World Champion Barton Lynch, gives the audience genuine technical insight into what they have just watched. Armed with that context and the AI breakdown, spectators then cast a live vote through technology built specifically for WPSL, producing an audience score out of ten. The final wave score is the average of the AI's number and the crowd's.

We are not trying to remove emotion from surfing. We are trying to be honest about where it belongs. An algorithm cannot reward the underdog, back a favourite, or feel a crowd lift for a rider mid-heat - and it should not pretend to. But an audience can, transparently, in the open, as a vote rather than a hidden thumb on the scale. Heart stays in the sport. It simply moves from behind a judges' curtain into the open, where everyone can see it operating.

The Question We Have to Ask Ourselves

Here is the uncomfortable part. Is elite surfing, as we currently score it, actually biased against women - or are the very best men genuinely superior athletes by every measure that matters? Judged against the traditional criteria, most people would say the men win that argument. So we removed the traditional criteria, and the judges who apply it, and asked the question again from scratch.

Is there a real reason the world's best female surfers cannot generate as much height in the air as the best men? Some of it, honestly, is physiology - power and mass do matter in certain manoeuvres. But raw power has never been the only language of athletic excellence. Timing, strength-to-weight ratio, precision and style are just as demanding, and just as worthy of a ten.

Some of this thinking comes from my wife, Rita, who surfs and has also competed in rhythmic gymnastics. Watching her move between the two disciplines, it is impossible not to notice the grace, timing and precision that gymnastics demands - qualities that are every bit as athletic as raw power, and that surf judging has historically undervalued.

There is a sporting precedent for this. Women's MMA does not compete against men in the octagon, yet it regularly headlines fight cards. Anyone who has trained jiu-jitsu knows that technique beats strength far more often than raw aggression does, and audiences who understand the sport watch women's fights with the same intensity as men's - not despite the technical skill on display, but because of it. Surfing, like skateboarding, is a sport where grace, timing and line can be every bit as compelling to watch as vertical power. It is our judging system, not the surfing itself, that has told audiences otherwise.

One Crown, Equal Opportunity to Wear It

We are not proposing a perfect system. We are proposing a fairer starting point, and we would rather say that plainly than pretend otherwise.

WPSL will crown one World Surfing Champion, not a men's champion and a women's champion competing in parallel for separate versions of the same title. That is a deliberate choice. It does not guarantee a woman lifts the trophy any more than it guarantees a man does. What it guarantees is that every surfer in the field, regardless of gender, has an equal opportunity to win it - the same waves, the same scoring system, the same heat, the same crowd. Nobody's route to the title runs through a smaller field, a shorter tour, or a lesser wave.

We also do not intend to lock this system in place and declare it finished. Rigid rules can strangle creativity in a sport built on self-expression - but the right amount of structure can also sharpen it, and finding that balance is not a one-off decision, it is ongoing work. So WPSL will move and flow with what actually works in the water, across different pools and wave conditions, rather than defending a format because it was the one we launched with. We expect to adjust judging weightings, heat structures and formats as we learn. The athletes competing in these heats, and the audiences voting on them, will do more to show us the right path forward than any boardroom debate could. That willingness to adapt is not a weakness in the model. It is the model.

Where This Leaves Us

We do not claim to have the whole answer. What we have is a starting position: score the wave, not the surfer's gender or reputation; put the criteria and the data on screen where everyone can check our working; and let the crowd's voice count for something, openly, instead of quietly through a judge's private instinct.

Remove the old prejudice from the criteria, and something interesting happens. Women's surfing does not need to be protected or handicapped to be compelling - it needs the opportunity to be judged on its own terms, in the same heat, against the same standard, in front of the same audience. Level the opportunity, and the level of the sport will follow. What "elite surfing" means will end up being shaped as much by the feminine contribution to the sport as the masculine one - which, business case aside, is simply a more interesting sport to watch.

It also happens to be good business. Women's surf and lifestyle brands consistently outperform their male-focused equivalents commercially. Building a sport that treats women's surfing as full value, not partial value, is not just the right call. It is the smart one.

WPSL1 Adrena, Saudi Arabia, launches October 2027 as the first event in a new global arena-based wave pool series, judged by People Power™.

The Future of Surf Competition Belongs in Stadiums (not like a football stadium).

For more than half a century, competitive surfing has been built around one thing: waiting. Waiting for waves. Waiting for tides. Waiting for wind. Waiting for heats to begin. Waiting for scores. Waiting for conditions to improve.

For surfers, this uncertainty has always been accepted as part of the sport's DNA. For spectators, broadcasters and commercial partners, it has always been its greatest weakness. But we are now entering a new era, and the emergence of high-performance wave technology is no longer simply creating perfect waves — it is forcing us to ask a far bigger question: what should competitive surfing actually look like when nature is no longer in control?

Wave Pools Have Exposed Surfing's Biggest Problem

Artificial waves remove almost every environmental variable. Every competitor can receive the same wave. Every ride begins from virtually the same starting point. Every opportunity is equal. On paper, this should produce the fairest surfing contests ever created. Instead, it has exposed something uncomfortable: traditional surf competition formats become surprisingly monotonous when every wave is identical.

This isn't because surfing is boring. It is because the existing competition model was never designed for perfect consistency. The stop-start heat format, priority rules, score building and subjective judging evolved to manage the chaos of the ocean. Remove that chaos and the weaknesses become impossible to ignore, and the audience quickly begins watching the same manoeuvres on the same wave repeated over and over. The excitement disappears.

The Problem Isn't the Athletes

The world's best surfers have never been more talented. Their progression continues at an extraordinary pace, and they are capable of creativity, technical innovation and athletic performance that would have been unimaginable even ten years ago. Yet competition often asks them to perform inside an increasingly narrow definition of what "good surfing" looks like, and the irony is difficult to ignore: at exactly the moment technology allows surfers complete freedom to express themselves, competition increasingly rewards conformity.

Many of the people defining that criteria come from judging systems developed decades ago, with philosophies that struggle to keep pace with the sport itself. Too often, decisions are made by committees and officials rather than by embracing the evolving language of modern surfing and the diverse ways elite surfers interpret a wave. The result is predictable: surfers begin surfing for scores rather than surfing for possibility. Innovation becomes risk. Consistency becomes reward. The audience loses.

Imagine If Other Sports Never Evolved

Every major global sport has reinvented itself. Formula One transformed itself into a global entertainment product. Cricket introduced Twenty20. Rugby embraced Sevens. Golf invested heavily in stadium experiences and technology. Tennis modernised scheduling, broadcasting and fan engagement. Surfing, by contrast, has largely attempted to place new technology inside an old competition model. It feels like putting a Formula One car on a Victorian road.

Wave technology deserves formats designed specifically for wave technology — not adaptations of systems created for unpredictable ocean conditions.

Surf Stadiums, Not Surf Parks

The future is bigger than wave pools. It is surf stadiums: purpose-built venues where every seat offers a clear view, with massive screens, lighting, music, real-time athlete data and digital fan engagement. Entertainment before, during and after competition. Events designed for television and live audiences simultaneously. Not simply places where surfing happens, but places built around the experience of watching surfing.

This is a real question every surf park operator should be asking themselves right now. The infrastructure for stadium-grade surf entertainment already exists in dozens of facilities around the world — the question is whether those venues are being used to their full potential, or simply as sessions sold by the hour. The same transformation that happened to tennis, basketball and mixed martial arts can happen for surfing. Perhaps even more dramatically.

The Audience Must Become Part of the Event

Modern sports fans expect participation. They expect interaction. They expect storytelling. The next generation of surf competition should embrace live analytics, multiple camera perspectives, athlete biometrics, predictive statistics, audience voting, immersive broadcast experiences and digital engagement that makes spectators feel connected to every ride. Fans should understand what they're watching without needing years of surfing experience — the greatest sporting events in the world make complexity accessible. Surfing should do the same.

Wave Pools Have an Environmental Responsibility Too

There is an uncomfortable question that surf parks rarely address head-on: what does it cost the planet to manufacture a wave? Surfing has always drawn its identity from a connection to nature — a sport born from reading the ocean, respecting it, and depending on it. As the sport moves into purpose-built, energy-intensive facilities, that relationship with the environment cannot be left behind. It has to be designed in from the start, not retrofitted once the criticism arrives.

This is where Saudi Arabia's Adrena wave pool offers a genuinely instructive example. The facility, developed by Red Sea Global at The Red Sea destination, operates entirely on renewable energy, uses a closed-loop seawater system that filters and recirculates water through its attractions, and applies dark-sky lighting principles to limit its impact on the surrounding ecosystem. Group CEO John Pagano has said the district was "built with sustainability at its core," positioning it as an example of regenerative rather than purely extractive tourism.

That standard should not be exceptional. It should be the baseline expectation for any surf park claiming to represent a sport so closely tied to environmental awareness. Every operator building or running a wave pool has a responsibility to ask the same questions Adrena has already answered: where does the power come from, how is the water managed, and what is actually being given back to the surrounding environment. A sport that has spent decades campaigning against ocean pollution and coastal development cannot credibly build its future on facilities that ignore their own footprint.

Saudi Arabia Could Become Surfing's Most Unexpected Destination

Many people still associate surfing exclusively with coastlines and ocean swells. That assumption is rapidly becoming outdated. Countries investing heavily in tourism, entertainment and next-generation sporting infrastructure have an opportunity to leapfrog traditional surf nations, and Saudi Arabia may become one of the most fascinating examples.

Vision 2030 is already reshaping how the Kingdom approaches tourism, sport, entertainment and international events. Purpose-built destinations, integrated entertainment districts and world-class infrastructure are changing perceptions at remarkable speed, and a world-class surf stadium fits naturally within that vision. It is climate-independent. It operates year-round. It creates destination tourism. It supports hospitality, retail, events, coaching, participation and elite competition from a single venue. Unlike many traditional surf destinations, every aspect of the visitor experience can be intentionally designed.

The result isn't simply another sporting facility. It becomes an entertainment destination capable of attracting families, tourists, athletes, broadcasters and commercial partners from around the world. Surfing no longer needs to wait for good conditions. It simply opens its doors.

The Future Will Reward Creativity

Technology is changing surfing faster than governing bodies can adapt. That is not unusual — history shows innovation almost always arrives before institutions are ready for it. The organisations leading surfing today face a significant challenge: they must honour the sport's heritage while recognising that heritage alone cannot define its future. Wave technology has not simply created a better training environment. It has created an entirely new sporting platform, and those willing to rethink competition from first principles — not simply modify existing formats — will define the next generation of surfing.

Surfing Deserves Better Than Repetition

The greatest surfers in the world should not be measured solely by how effectively they repeat a judging criteria. They should be encouraged to redefine it. Sport evolves when athletes are allowed to expand the boundaries of possibility, and wave technology finally gives surfing that opportunity.

The question is no longer whether stadium surfing will become mainstream. The technology is already here. The investment is already happening. The audience is waiting. The only real question is whether the sport — and the surf parks now responsible for its future — has the courage to reinvent itself, sustainably and on its own terms, before somebody else does it for them.

Because the future of surf competition won't be built by asking how to improve yesterday's format. It will be built by imagining what becomes possible when every wave is perfect, every fan has the best seat in the house, every surfer is finally free to show us what they believe great surfing truly looks like — and every facility making that possible can stand behind its environmental footprint as confidently as it stands behind its waves.

About the author

Justin West is a professional surf coach and competition judge, grew up and later worked in Saudi Arabia — often having to travel abroad simply to catch a wave. He is the CEO and Founder of wpsl.live podcastportugal.com and justinwestcoaching.com

Surfing Was Never a Fight. So Why Do We Judge It Like One?

Let's start with the number nobody in surfing liked talking about. In 2014, the men's winner at a World Surf League Championship Tour event took home $100,000. The women's winner took home $60,000 — same waves, same event, same job. In 2018, a photo went viral of a female junior surfer holding a novelty cheque for exactly half what the men's winner got. It took until 2019 for the WSL to fully close that gap.

Let that sink in. Not 1999. 2019.

We're not writing this to drag another league. We're writing it because it's the clearest evidence of a bigger problem: professional surfing has spent decades built around a version of "great surfing" that wasn't gender-neutral to begin with — and the money followed the bias.

What "great" actually looks like.

Open the official judging criteria for any major tour and you'll find the same list: commitment and degree of difficulty, speed, power and flow, innovative and progressive manoeuvres. On paper, neutral. In practice, a lot of surfers and fans have long argued those words quietly favour one register of surfing — explosive, aerial, high-commitment power surfing — over another register that's just as demanding: flow, rhythm, line, control, the kind of surfing that reads as more finesse than force.

Call it what you want. Masculine and feminine are loaded words and we're not here to pin either style to a gender — plenty of the most powerful surfers on earth are women, and plenty of the most stylish surfers on earth are men. That's exactly the point. Surfing has never actually been one thing. It's an interpretation. But when your scoring criteria quietly reward one interpretation over another, you're not judging surfing — you're judging a house style, and calling it objective.

We don't think that's a conspiracy. We think it's thirty years of a format nobody questioned hardening into "how it's done."

The other question we can't ignore

We'd be dishonest if we wrote about gender in sport right now and skipped the debate happening across almost every governing body in the world: how sport should handle transgender athletes competing in women's categories. It's a genuinely difficult question, and different sports — athletics, swimming, rugby, cycling — have landed in different places, often after years of consultation, legal challenge and disagreement among athletes themselves. For many women who've built a career around a female category, the concern is straightforward: that category exists because it protects a specific opportunity, and if that opportunity is complicated by open eligibility rules, that's a real cost to real athletes, not an abstraction.

We're not going to pretend there's a tidy answer to that, because there isn't one — not in surfing, not anywhere yet. What we can tell you is what we did with it.

Our answer: we didn't build the category

WPSL doesn't run a men's tour and a women's tour and then have to referee who belongs where. We built open heats from day one — every surfer in the same water, judged by the same crowd, on the same criteria: was that great to watch? That's not us dodging the debate. It's us removing the plumbing the debate depends on. No binary category means no fight over who's eligible for it. Every surfer earns their result the same way everyone else does — by producing something the crowd responds to.

We're not claiming that solves gender politics in sport. Nobody's format does. What it does is give every surfer — regardless of who they are — the same blank canvas and the same audience. No panel deciding in advance what a scoring wave should look like. No category built around assumptions about what a man's surfing or a woman's surfing is supposed to be.

Surfing, more than almost any other sport, has room to be reinterpreted. Power or flow. Committed or controlled. Explosive or effortless. We don't want to prescribe which one is "correct" — because we don't think there is one. We want to hand the wave to the best surfers on earth and let them show us what they think great looks like.

Then we're going to let the people watching decide if they're right.

WPSL — Wave Pool Surf League. wpsl.live

WE'RE NOT HERE TO JUDGE. WE'RE HERE TO WATCH.

Surfing hasn't changed in 30 years our team mate Barton Lynch, 1988 world champion and one of the sport's most respected voices explains. “Professional surfing hasn't really changed in 30 years” he told us. “Yes, there's been some small changes in equipment, some tweaks to the criteria.” Small tweaks. Thirty years.

We think that's long enough.

Today we're launching WPSL — the Wave Pool Surf League.

WHY

Surfing has always had a problem: it's an art form being scored like a spreadsheet. A panel of judges, most of whom will never surf as well as the athletes in the water, sit on a beach with a checklist — critical section, degree of difficulty, commitment, innovation — and try to reduce something that's genuinely creative into a number out of ten.

The result, in recent years, has been ugly. Heats decided by decimal points. Inconsistent scoring that's cost athletes results, money, and — frankly — their trust in the system. Instant replay and slow-motion breakdowns posted to social media the moment a score drops, dissecting every call in real time. The cynic in us could say some of that scoring drama is good for engagement. The surfer in us knows it's bad for the sport.

Surfing was never meant to be marked. It was meant to be watched.

WHAT WE'RE BUILDING

WPSL flips the model. We provide the canvas — a purpose-built, arena-scale wave pool, identical waves on demand, no waiting, no weather, no excuses. What happens next is entirely up to the athletes. They draw the lines. They decide what bold looks like, what style looks like, what a genuinely great wave looks like. And the audience — the people who showed up, who are standing in the arena, who understand exciting surfing when they see it — decides who wins.

We call it People Power™ judging. No panel. No hidden criteria written by committee. The crowd scores the heat, live, through the app, in real time. It's simple: if you're a fan and you found it thrilling, that counts.

Yes, it's controversial. Good.

We're also running open heats — men, women and juniors competing together in the same heat, on the same waves, for the same result. We know that's going to raise eyebrows. We're doing it anyway, because a controlled, identical wave pool is the fairest environment surfing has ever had to test this properly, and because we think the audience wants to watch great surfing, not a category. Skill, style and innovation aren't gendered or age-gated — let's actually find out what happens when everyone's judged on the same wave, by the same crowd, at the same time.

We'd rather start a conversation than protect a format nobody's questioned in three decades.

THE TEAM

WPSL is being built by people who've lived on both sides of this problem — inside the judging towers and inside the barrel.

Justin West, Founder & CEO, has spent 28+ years across competitive surfing, wave pool training and global athlete culture — including a stint as Director of the Saudi Rugby Association. He's also an IBJJF European Masters Jiu Jitsu Gold Medalist, which tells you most of what you need to know about his tolerance for being told what “correct” technique looks like by someone who isn't in the arena.

Dan Luger MBE, Co-Founder & Chairman, is a former England Rugby World Cup winner and British & Irish Lion whose post-rugby career has spanned finance, investment relationships and international business development. Dan leads our strategic partnerships, investor relations and capital raising — someone who's built things at the top level of elite sport and knows exactly what it takes to scale one commercially.

Barton Lynch, our Surfing Sage & Ambassador, is the 1988 World Champion and one of the most respected voices in the sport. Nobody understands the gap between what surfing is and what surfing scores better than a world champion who's spent three decades watching the format stand still — and Barton brings that expert knowledge and authentic credibility to WPSL's broadcast presence.

Jamie Mitchell, our Athlete Ambassador, is a world champion waterman and elite big-wave athlete with global recognition across surfing and endurance sport. Jamie brings athlete credibility and performance insight straight from the water into how WPSL is built.

They're backed by a broader team and advisory bench spanning finance, brand partnerships and international communications — people who've worked with organisations like Red Bull, adidas, Universal Music Group and Chelsea FC — brought together for one reason: to build the league the sport's been asking for, and to give it the commercial and creative infrastructure to actually scale.

WHY NOW

34 wave pools are already operational worldwide, with 200+ more in the global development pipeline (WavePoolMag, 2026). Countries with genuinely spectacular natural conditions and serious capital behind them — the United States, Australia and across Europe among them — are entering the sport at scale. Surf tourism alone is a market worth $71.7B today, projected to reach $95.9B by 2030 (Grand View Research).

At the same time, the world is leaning hard into health, recovery, longevity and wellness — and surfing sits right at the intersection of all of it. Movement, ocean, lifestyle, hospitality. The opportunities for tourism and wellness collaboration around events like ours aren't a side note; they're a huge part of why this moment exists.

Arena events give us controlled conditions, festival energy, and a broadcast-ready product — the pieces that were always missing. Now we have them. That means the only thing left standing between surfing and its next era is the format itself.

So we changed it.

The numbers back it

We're not asking anyone to take this on vibes alone. Our WPSL1 pilot event model is built for a healthy EBITDA margin even in year one, before you even count the value of the media assets, sponsor proof and IP an event like that generates. Scaled to a full six-event annual tour plus a season-ending Global Final, we're modelling toward meaningful revenue growth and league-wide profitability. That's before broadcast rights and sponsorship mature the way they typically do once a league proves itself in year one. We're building this deliberately — pilot first, prove the concept, then scale.

WHAT'S NEXT

WPSL1, our flagship pilot event, launches at Adrena, Saudi Arabia — October 2027 — three days, open categories, People Power™ judging, and a festival atmosphere built for fans, not just competitors.

We're not asking surfing to be perfect. We're asking it to be honest about what makes it great — and letting the people watching decide.

Welcome to WPSL. Let's see what the athletes draw.

WPSL — Wave Pool Surf League. wpsl.live