Newport Harbor High School:

Chase Wilson

Newport Harbor High School senior Chase Wilson will have already surfed the waters off South Africa, Fiji, Indonesia and El Salvador before he walks across the stage to collect his high school diploma today.

“It’s just a fun feeling you get when you ride a wave,” he said. “It’s a fun thing to do — it excites me.”

Chase has managed to successfully combine professional surfing and high school, maintaining a 3.6 grade-point average at Newport Harbor High School while traveling the world for competitive events.

“You have to really work hard, put a lot of time into it and make some sacrifices to balance the two,” Chase said. “I would be gone on a trip and miss two weeks of school and I would just have to talk to my teachers and let them know I would be gone to keep caught up on it.”

At 18, Chase has already collected sponsorships from LOST clothing and boards, Surfside Sports, Arnette and Dakine.

He placed 16th in an International Surfing Assn. world event in France last year. He’s also a two-time member of the Pac Sun USA Surf Team.

Chase is headed to UC Santa Barbara in the fall, where he plans to take it easy his first year, taking the minimum amount of courses so he can still travel to surfing competitions.

Finding a college close to the water was key. He hopes to get some good waves in in the winter, when the point breaks are good there, he said.

“I applied to everywhere that was close to the water because I wouldn’t be able to surf if I went somewhere inland, and that would be terrible,” he said.

— Brianna Bailey