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™.

POWER TO THE PEOPLE: HOW WPSL'S PEOPLE POWER™ ACTUALLY WORKS

For decades, competitive surfing came down to five people in a tower nobody in the crowd can see, holding up a number nobody in the crowd can question. Great wave? Doesn't matter what you thought. The judges have already decided.

We're done with that.

Every wave. Every heat. Every event. You decide.

Not a panel. Not a governing body. Not five people who trained to score a checklist. You — watching live, or watching the replay — vote for the surfer you think actually won the heat.

That's People Power™ APP. It's the mechanism behind everything we've been saying about WPSL from day one: we build the canvas, the surfers draw the lines, and the audience decides what great looks like. This is that idea, built into an actual voting system.

"But won't the most popular surfer always win?"

Maybe. And here's the thing — we're genuinely fine with that.

Popularity has always been part of professional sport, whether the scoring system admits it or not. Athletes today aren't just technicians executing manoeuvres for a panel; they're brands, storytellers, personalities people choose to follow. People Power™ doesn't invent that dynamic — it just stops pretending it isn't there, and hands the outcome to the people the sport actually exists for.

What that unlocks is bigger than a fairer scoreline. Underdogs get discovered. New personalities break through, not because they've cracked a scoring formula, but because they connected with a crowd. Athletes stop being purely dependent on landing a manoeuvre a certain way for a certain judge, and start building something that travels with them — a following, a story, a reason people show up specifically to watch them surf.

WHAT IT MEANS IF YOU'RE WATCHING

You stop being a spectator and become part of the result. Vote live during heats. Back your favourite surfer. Build a following of your own inside the WPSL community — rankings, prediction competitions, bragging rights for calling a result before the crowd caught on. You're not watching surfing happen to a panel anymore. You're part of how it gets decided.

WHAT IT MEANS IF YOU'RE AN ATHLETE

Your ceiling stops being "did five judges like that manoeuvre." People Power™ rewards surfers who can do the hard part — genuinely excellent surfing — and also connect with the people watching it. That's not a lesser skill. Building an audience, telling your story, giving fans a reason to back you: that's part of what it means to be a professional athlete in 2026, whether surfing's old scoring system accounted for it or not.

HOW WE'RE ACTUALLY ROLLING THIS OUT

Here's the honest version, because we'd rather under-promise and over-deliver than the other way around: we're not launching a fully built app on day one.

We're starting on Instagram.

Before we invest in building and scaling a dedicated People Power™ app, we want to test the format where surf fans already are — live polls and story voting on Instagram, tied to real heats, real athletes, real waves. It's the fastest way to find out what actually works: how people want to vote, what makes them want to vote again, what a fair and exciting live-voting experience should feel like before we lock it into permanent product decisions.

Think of it as the pilot before the platform — the same instinct behind everything else at WPSL. Prove the concept in the water, then build the infrastructure around what actually works, not what we assumed would work from a whiteboard.

So if you're around for WPSL1 at Adrena, Saudi Arabia, this is where it starts. Follow along, vote in the polls, tell us what felt right and what didn't. You're not just watching us build People Power™. For this first stretch, you're the reason we'll get it right.

Surfing decided by the people. Let's see how loud you are.

WPSL — Wave Pool Surf League. wpsl.live