By Mike Latronic – Having been to nearly 20 of these ISA Junior events personally, I find my first thoughts go to the amazing youth talent that gathers from around the world, and especially from here in Hawaii. But traveling this much also means a front-row seat to the massive planning, prep, and logistics behind it all. Getting 12 kids, two coaches, and several assistant parents to El Salvador for the 2026 Surf City ISA World Junior Surfing Championship was no small task. Grueling, emotional tryouts, earnest fundraisers, and the mix of joy and heartbreak that comes with some kids making the cut and others not — it’s a roller coaster, fast and sometimes scary, but somehow I always want to jump back in line and feel that special feeling again, because traveling with Team Hawaii is an honor I don’t take lightly.
There was no van this year. No pre-dawn fussing with roof racks, no windows fogging up on the drive to the beach. Instead, the team checked into the cozy, quaint, and well-positioned Papaya Surf Garden, right in front of La Bocana, and walked downstairs. The wave was already there. The hotel sat close enough to the contest site that watching the ocean and getting ready to compete in it were basically the same activity.
Team Hawaii had landed nearly a week early to adjust, and so had almost everyone else. Fifty-six national teams and some 420 youth athletes had descended on Surf City, and by the time the opening ceremony rolled around, flags planted in the sand, it was clear this wasn’t going to be a quiet trip. That showed the first morning: glassy water, the sky turning orange and blue at sunrise, and a lineup that looked less like the empty scene surfers dream about and more like an anthill descending on a spoonful of honey. The first session wasn’t about peak performance. It was about getting wet, getting acclimated, and staying calm while honoring the Aloha spirit in a 420-surfer scrum for waves, exactly what the coaches reminded Team Hawaii most of all.
Making the Cut
Each year, the Hawaii Surf Team invites boys and girls under 18 to try out for twelve spots on the team that represents Hawaii at the ISA World Junior Surfing Championship. It’s essentially surfing’s youth Olympics, and in Hawaii, that carries real weight.
Hawaii’s most iconic athlete, Olympic swimmer and surfer Duke Kahanamoku, first dreamed of surfing at the Olympics back in 1912. It took until 2016 for the International Olympic Committee to agree, and Tokyo 2020 to make it real. ISA President Fernando Aguerre spent decades pushing the case for surfing’s inclusion, and his longtime strategic advisor Robert Fasulo, a veteran of the U.S. Olympic events helped him get it across the finish line. Long before that vote, though, the ISA had already built the road that gets a surfer there. The World Junior Surfing Championship, first held in 1980, has been the first stage for surfers who go on to rule the world tour and, now, the Olympics too.
El Salvador has hosted three of the last five World Junior Championships. It’s not lost on anyone here that Hawaii, the place Kahanamoku’s dream actually started, still sends its own team to chase that dream, even though Hawaii itself will never get to compete at the actual Olympics. Here’s the wrinkle. Hawaii is a state, part of the United States, and the Olympics only recognizes athletes through National Olympic Committees tied to sovereign nations. So when surfing lines up at the Games, it’s Team USA that walks out, not Team Hawaii, no matter how much of the sport’s history and soul traces back to these islands. What Hawaii does have is a different kind of recognition. The sport’s own pro tour has treated Hawaii as its own surfing nation since 1976, and the ISA has carried that tradition forward at events like this one. It’s a highly competitive surfing territory similar to Tahiti and Puerto Rico and the inclusion pays homage to the Hawaiian Islands as the birthplace of the sport. Hawaii has made the most of it: gold in 2022, its first team title since 2014, then silver in 2023 and again in 2024.
Fast forward to February 2026. This year’s dozen made it through a selection camp that’s its own small pressure cooker: two-day tryouts by division, every February on Oahu, open to any Hawaii-born or based junior willing to show up and be judged. Upwards of fifty kids showed up to fight for those twelve slots.
For Given Goodwin, 18, of Kauaʻi, this year’s trip is the payoff for a streak that would have broken plenty of kids: “I’ve been one or two spots off for the past four years now,” he said. “So it’s a big accomplishment of mine, and I’m super excited to go represent Hawaii in El Salvador.”
The Hawaii Amateur Surfing Association has been sending teams like this one long before this year’s roster was born. Alumni include Carissa Moore, Andy Irons, and Coco Ho to list just a few. Program Director Jason Shibata, a 1998 HST alumnus himself, came back in 2022 to run the program that raised him. Assistant coach Barak Maor rounds out the staff.
Meet the Team
Papaya Surf Garden takes its name from its owner, a local legend everyone simply calls Papaya. His real name is Jaime Delgado, an old-time El Salvador surfer who runs a surf shop and a surfboard factory and is thoroughly embedded in the country’s surf industry — something of a kingpin, though he carries it quietly and humbly. The Hawaii team enjoyed a traditional dinner, pupusas, ceviche, and other local delicacies, the kind of welcome that explains why this team keeps coming back.
Some of this roster had been here before. Tiger Abubo, 18, of Haena, Kauaʻi, punched his ticket back with a bronze medal at last year’s Worlds in Peru: “I was born and raised in Hawaii, so it’s really special to me to represent Hawaii on a world stage and show where I’m from.” Merrik Mochkatel, back for his second trip, was honest about what changed since 2024: “I was just a little bit too immature and went a little too wild. But I’m back, and I’m ready, confident and focused now.” He’s built a relationship with the wave itself: “I like to think of it almost like it’s Rocky Point. I surf that wave every day, so I just go out there, surf it like Rocky’s, and do my thing.” Skai Suitt, 16, on her third trip here, comes back as much for the team as the waves: “Surfing is normally an individual sport, but here at the ISAs, the whole team comes together and we support each other.” Leah Turner, 15, didn’t pretend making the team was easy this year: “It’s such a huge accomplishment to be here with the team.”
Then there’s a genuine wave of first-timers. Kingston Panebianco, 17, of Paia, Maui, arrives with a QS résumé most adults would envy — a third at the Sunset QS and back-to-back State and National titles — and no fear of sharing a heat with the sport’s biggest names: “You’re always the underdog, especially matching up against people like [Baron Mamiya] and John John [Florence]. It’s kind of a crazy feeling when you wind up beating them or advancing along with them.” Uilani Nakao, of Wailua, Kauaʻi, called making her first ISA appearance “probably the biggest I’ve gotten in my surfing so far.” Manalani Cazimero, the roster’s youngest at 13, opened her interview in Hawaiian before talking about what representing home means to her: “We live in one of the most beautiful places in the world with some of the best waves.” Elliamna Grubbs, 16, came up surfing through her older brothers, who “always pushed me and challenged me to just spend long hours in the water.” And Hayden Flores, 15, on his first trip out of the country, period, wasn’t shy about the team’s chances: “I believe that Hawaii has some of the strongest surfers and will go up there and dominate.”
The Competition
In the free surfing sessions, the crowd was intense, given the sheer number of competitors warming up. But there were moments of real clarity, when surfers had the room to showcase their skills and even after everything I’ve seen over two decades, my eyebrows still went up every few minutes. Crazy tail slides, creative rock-n-roll floaters, aerial maneuvers, and hard-core rail work were on display from every corner of the planet, more than I’ve ever seen at this event. It was quite the visual precursor to what was to come when the horn blew.
The overall depth of the field has grown enormously, too. A few years back, a number of the smaller Latin American, Asian, and European federations were still building out their programs, often sending athletes who were there for the experience more than the podium. That gap has closed fast. Hawaii typically ranks among the sport’s powerhouse teams, Australia, USA, Brazil but rising programs like Spain, France, Peru, Costa Rica, and Puerto Rico, to name a few, are now producing athletes who are a real threat. There were always great surfers from these countries, but now it seemed the whole team could be a threat.
Add to that a wrinkle that’s become more common across the sport: athletes who train and live in one place but compete under another country’s flag, thanks to a parent’s passport or family heritage. Zoie Zietz is a case in point. She grew up on Kauai in a well-known Hawaii surfing family, her uncle is Championship Tour surfer Sebastian Zietz, but she held dual citizenship through her parents and competed here for the Netherlands, advancing deep into the draw. She wasn’t the only dual-passport surfer trained on Hawaii’s own beaches but wearing another country’s colors this year, and more than a few of them were quietly knocking out some of the event’s bigger names. Kahlil Schooley from Maui did not make the final rounds but he’s another strong performer from Hawaii who holds a 2nd passport from Columbia.
The first few days bore that out. On Day 1, Elliamna Grubbs put up the highest single-wave score of the entire day, a 9.00, on a series of long arcs through wide-open carves. Tiger Abubo, the reigning bronze medalist, cruised to a convincing opening-round win. Kingston Panebianco had the toughest morning of the bunch, a tight heat that came down to the final two minutes. Across the early rounds, the whole team held up well, with only one surfer needing the all-important repechage round to stay alive. That was Kingston, who dropped into the repechage in a later round and fought his way right back into the main draw.
The Draw Tightens
Team Hawaii peaked at 2nd in the team standings after Day 6, trading medal position with Australia the way it has since 2022. Day 7 is when the ground started to shift. Tiger Abubo, the reigning bronze medalist, was eliminated in a stacked heat that ended on a buzzer-beater from Portugal’s Manuel Couto, and USA moved past Hawaii into 2nd. Merrik Mochkatel answered with one of the highest single-wave scores of the entire event, an 8.83, to win a four-way heat and keep his own run alive, only to be eliminated himself the very next round. Zoey Kaina, the team’s returning copper medalist, kept surviving tight heats one after another. Skai Suitt, who’d opened the tournament with a tournament-best 9.00 back on Day 2, pushed into Round 5 before she and Uilani Nakao were both eliminated. By the time Finals Day arrived, no one wearing a Hawaii jersey was left to surf in it. I’ll say this plainly, too. Team Hawaii represented proudly and surfed strong all week. Several of these kids were competing years younger than their division typically sees, and that’s not an excuse. It’s a promise. They’re only coming back stronger next year. As Coach Batz said, “If you don’t win, learn.”
Finals Day: Australia’s Record, and a Reminder of How Far This Reaches
By September 13, three-to-four-foot surf was peeling across the same cobblestone peaks of La Bocana that Team Hawaii had been walking down to all week, and Australia made it official: a tenth team title, their third straight, and their most convincing yet with six individual medals, half of them gold. It’s a run with a real history behind it. Australia’s first team title came in 2004, in only the second edition of this event. Five more followed in a row from 2006 to 2010, then one in 2013, then a decade of podium finishes that never quite reached the top, until Dane Henry and Ziggy Aloha Mackenzie broke through in 2024 and Ocean Lancaster held the line in 2025. This year, Australia produced three new World Junior Champions at once.
USA took the team silver, the same finish as a year ago. Brazil claimed bronze and Peru copper, also matching last year’s order exactly.
The individual finals were where the real history got made. Leihani Zoric, all of 13 and surfing up in the U/18 division on a wildcard entry she said she never expected to use, posted the highest heat total in her division for the entire event, a 16.00, to become the youngest-ever ISA U/18 World Junior Champion. “I put it up everywhere in my house,” she said afterward, “and my nana always told me I was gonna become the first Zoric world champion, and I did.” She’s now the ninth Australian woman to hold an ISA World Junior title, a list that includes Stephanie Gilmore, Sally Fitzgibbons, and Tyler Wright, and the first to take the U/18 crown specifically since Wright did it in 2010.
The one crack in Australia’s armor came in the U/18 Boys Final, where 17-year-old Jett Maughan of Cardiff, California, denied what was shaping up as a clean Australian sweep, edging silver medalist Ben Zanatta Creagh and reigning U/16 champion Ocean Lancaster by a combined 0.06 points between the three of them. Maughan built to it all event long, including a 9.00 in the semifinal for a backhand air reverse. “I just figured there’s nothing to lose, I’m already in the Final, so I gave it my everything,” he said. Brazil’s John Muller took the copper.
Australia closed out the sweep in both U/16 divisions. Lucy Darragh, who’d finished a frustrated bronze in 2025, came back hungrier and became the third Australian woman to win the U/16 title, after Sierra Kerr in 2023 and Ziggy Aloha Mackenzie in 2024. Zoë Panettiere of the USA took silver behind her. Alani Morse’s bronze was New Zealand’s best-ever individual result at this event and lifted the team to its best ranking since it hosted the Championship at Piha in 2010; Tahiti’s Takihei Ellacott took copper in the same final. In the boys’ final, 15-year-old Locana Cullen turned tricky onshore wind into an airshow, landing a full rotation worth an 8.67 on his way to a 16.44 heat total, ahead of Japan’s Taro Matsuno and fellow Australian Rio Luther Barr. Peru’s Lucca Barrientos took copper, the country’s first WJSC boys medal since 2016.
A handful of other results were milestones in their own right. Luara Mandelli’s bronze in the U/18 Girls was only the second WJSC medal ever won by a Brazilian woman, the first since 2006, and Victoria Muñoz Larreta’s copper made her the first Argentine ever to medal in the girls’ division.
And then there was the medal that landed closest to home without ever touching Team Hawaii’s scoreboard. Zoie Zietz’s run for the Netherlands ended in silver in the U/18 Girls Final, the first WJSC medal in that country’s history.
ISA President Fernando Aguerre closed the event by putting words to what the whole week had felt like from the sand: “In a world full of conflicts and difficult situations, sometimes it is very hard to have hope when you see so many problems. But we are a show and a proof that hope is possible. When people get together around a surfing competition, we are in peace.