Lauren Leach floats on her surfboard in The Pit, a popular surf spot in Santa Barbara. Her hands gently glide across the water, and the sunlight hits the ocean’s horizon just right to create a halo of peace and serenity. She looks down. A massive shark is swimming right below her.
“I’m honestly surprised that its fin didn’t accidentally touch me, there was a certain grace to the movement of its body and it was just amazing,” Leach said.
The journalism senior grew up in land-locked Ohio and would skateboard as a mode of transportation in high school, but catching waves off the Central Coast was not an option until she got to Cal Poly.
“I didn’t have any expectations; I didn’t have anything at all,” Leach said.
Leach’s boyfriend drew her into the surfing community, a community that supported and helped Leach commit to learning to surf.
According to Leach, a classic quote is“the best surfer in the water is the one having fun,” and reigns its truth.
“It’s a commitment to learn. You have to commit to being bad for two years minimum, and finding enjoyment in all those moments is important,” Leach said. “You don’t need to be good to have fun.”
Despite being new to the surfing game, Leach searched for a community of girls in the water, more surfer friends who were women and lifted each other up. Two years ago, her dream became the launching point for Grrrls On Boards, the Central Coast women’s surfing club that rides on the edge of femininity, according to Leach.
Leach took inspiration from GRLSWIRL, specifically its CEO Lucy Jean, who founded the Venice-based women’s skateboarding collective. GRLSWIRL coined the term “world’s okayest skater,” focusing on creating a community that empowers women skaters.
The ‘grrrls’ in their title stems from ‘Riot Grrrl,’ a punk rock feminist movement in the 1990s that sprouted in the Pacific North-West with a mission to bring girl power into the limited world of predominately male punk music, according to Leach.
Surfing and skateboarding are two male-dominated sports, and Grrrls On Boards exists to create a space for female surfers and skaters on the Central Coast.
“It was about making a space in an intense way and not doing it quietly because nothing else was working,” Leach said.
With 183 women in their group chat, Grrrls On Boards hosts group surfs and group skates, and is not exclusive to Cal Poly. According to Leach, surfing and skateboarding exist outside of the Cal Poly bubble and she wants Grrrls On Boards to represent that. The main goal of the club is to meet one girl to surf or skate with outside of the club. Leach said she hopes the club can be a supportive place for other girls wanting to learn.
“You automatically take a position when you start a group of people who are very focused on encouraging each other, and I think it’s about doing our thing and encouraging and pushing each other to surf bigger and scarier waves,” Leach said.
Journalism junior and member of Grrrls On Boards Kayla Burke caught her first wave at three years old. Now an award-winning surfer, Burke is skilled in longboarding and shortboarding and competes with the Cal Poly surf team.
Members like Burke utilize the many avenues of Grrrls On Boards to find their person to surf with when group surfs are not happening. Burke said she would text the group chat and welcome people to go surfing with her.
As for business junior Marlena Deleeuw, her entire family surfs and skates and she grew up with a halfpipe and bowl in her backyard in Santa Cruz. She lived all her life in surf culture, an environment focused on localism and respecting the older generation of surfers who came before her.
“There is a certain sense of loyalty and community that you have to the older generations where you should keep spots and places underground so it doesn’t become blown up,” the Deleeuw said. “Surfing is way more fun when there’s less people, and it’s way more fun when you know everyone.”
Grrrls On Boards began as a surfing club, but business junior Toni Kwan had plans to incorporate another community of girls on boards – skateboards. Kwan has been hosting group skates at Santa Rosa Park since fall quarter, and with every group skate hosted, the more popular they became.
Kwan described the feeling as “literally electric,” and the last group skate lasted four hours and she was “so stoked.”
She noticed two girls at the park who weren’t a part of the group and yelled, “Hey, are you one of us? Do you want to be?”
“It’s so remarkable how the energy shifts when a group like us comes into the park and we’re all cheering each other on and fostering this energy of inclusion and support that people will piggyback on, everyone loves that shit,” Kawn said.
According to Leach, there is a group within Grrrls On Boards that goes surfing, searching for those enormous waves to charge and face their ocean fears. Deleeuw and Leach are a part of that fearless troupe.
“We’re facing that fear together, but if I’m being completely honest, us girls in the group, we don’t have a lot of fear to go around,” Leach said.
In January, six of the grrrls went to Morro to a rough surf spot, and onlookers froze after hatching a glimpse of the female surfers charging the waves.
“It felt so cool and empowering to have us all paddling out together into this lineup where before – maybe just ten years ago – no girls would surf there,” Deleeuw said.
Leach hopes to bring more grrrls outside of Cal Poly to join the club, setting a community of engagement and empowerment outside of the college “bubble.”
“For our club, we focus on saying that we’re here and it’s really important for female surfers to stand up for their fellow female surfers and do it in the much wider space of the world,” Leach said.