Surfers Must Use Wait-and-See Approach

First things first. If you think you’ll find out if Huntington Beach successfully defended its National High School surfing title Saturday at Lower Trestles, you’re wrong.

At least, that’s what Janice Aragon of the National Scholastic Surfing Assn. said Saturday.

“We really don’t want to announce the winners until the banquet [today],” said Aragon, who organized the six-day contest. “I know you guys from the media want the results now so they’ll be in the paper the next day, but we don’t think it’s fair until the competitors have been told first at the banquet. It makes it special for them to be told on the spot.”

The winner could be any of four teams. At the start of Saturday’s competition, La Jolla had 59 points, Edison and Huntington Beach were tied at 66 and San Dieguito was in the lead with 68 points.

Andy Verdone, who coaches the Huntington Beach Surf team, was nervous at the end of Saturday’s competition. Talking to himself, Verdone kept saying, “I think we might have pulled this out. At least according to my tally.”

Aragon said in all the 20 years she has been putting on this contest, she has never seen such a close finish.

“Oh, I’ve seen close ones with two teams, but four teams this close--this is a first for me,” she said.

For Verdone and his team of boys, girls and bodyboarders and longboarders, it seemed that they would have little difficulty in winning their 17th National title going into the competition.

But unforeseen results in the first heats left Verdone without his big guns going into the semifinals and finals.

“We lost Ryan Turner, Danny Nichols and Matt Shadbolt in the early rounds and that was a big loss for us,” Verdone said. “Fortunately for us, we got a miracle in Micah Byrne, Steve Maybeno and Alison Arivizu.”

Although Arivizu accounted for some need points, it was the surfing of freshman Byrne and bodyboarder Maybeno.

While a final score was not available for the boys’ high school individual final, it seemed clear the Byrne was the winner, pulling the only perfect score of 10 in the 20 minute heat.

Edison surfers Tim Reyes and Bobby Korte were also in that heat, and applied pressure to Byrne with high-scoring rides. But Byrne seemed unfazed by their efforts, and focused only on his surfing.

“I went into the heat to have fun,” Byrne said. “I really don’t know how those other guys were doing. I wasn’t watching because I was busy with my surfing.”

In the men’s open, because final results were not available, the winner was not known, but based on what Bruce Irons of Hawaii did in his 20-minute heat, it’s safe to assume he will be the men’s open champion.

“I think I won,” said Irons, whose brother Andy was the men’s open champion last year. “I really want to win this. And I feel stoked in how I did today.”

The results will be announced at the Waterfront Hilton in Huntington Beach today at the 6:30 p.m. banquet.