There's A New Wave Pool Surf Tour Coming Soon
What do Gabriel Medina, Carissa Moore, Lakey Peterson, Filipe Toledo, Johanne Defay, Griffin Colapinto, Chris Brown, Tom Carroll and Rick Kane all have in common? You get 10 points if you guessed they have all won professional surf events in a Wave Pool. We’ll give you another 10 if you picked out that Rick Kane is a fictional character.
In the movie "North Shore," Kane won 500 bucks in the Arizona Surf Classic in what he called a Wave Tank. And we’ve all had a few of those. IRL, Tom Carroll won the 1985 World Professional Inland Surfing Championships, held in Allentown, Pennsylvania. The rest claimed victories either at Kelly’s Surf Ranch or in Abu Dhabi in CT events. Add individual multi-location series like Stab High, various Red Bull-sponsored comps, and wave pools have been stitched, unevenly, into surfing’s competitive fabric for decades.
The recently announced Wavepool Surf Tour (WPST) is a new attempt to codify all the tubs with a format designed just for wave parks. The brainchild of Mark Fessler, former Head of Operations at Alaïa Bay, he reckons the time is right for a competition format built specifically for wave-pool surfing and the people who are helping drive its growth.
If you think that might be a clutch of the world's best surfers, replicating, or even one day replacing, the CT, but with all events held in pools, think again. For now, the concept is based on online submissions. Competitors can pick from eight competition divisions with four special categories. These cover different age groups, genders, and disciplines, including groms and legends, adaptive and bodyboarding. Then they surf at the chosen wave pool venue, download footage of their waves from the official video provider, and upload the two best ones. A panel of international judges will watch the footage and choose who gets through.
It’s effectively an online qualification process. That’s not revolutionary. In 2014, Costa Rican Carlos Muñoz won the Hurley Pro Video Trials and gained a wildcard into the CT. The Vans Triple Crown went online in 2020 before dying a deserved horrible digital death three years later. The Big Wave Challenge runs on a similar process.
The WPST (not to be confused with PTSD) passes from the digital to the real world with a live event crowning champions across all categories — the Grand Final of the Wavepool Surf Tour season. Now at this stage, the tour is largely conceptual. The only qualifying event taking entries at this stage is Switzerland’s Alaia Bay. The location for the live Grand Final event is yet to be announced. In effect, as it stands now, the “Tour” is a solitary online qualifying event in Switzerland, though the website boasts that there will be nine events in nine countries.
Yet, it's early days. The plan is to have individual Wave Pools sign up and add their own qualifying events, which would magnify the numbers and add revenue, with entries currently coming in at 30 bucks a pop. With 33 surfing wave pools currently in operation around the globe, and a dozen more under active construction in Europe, Asia, Australia, the Middle East, and the Americas, it's not hard to see why Fessler and co see where growth could come from.
WPST claim that this is a competition structure for a new era: a digital-first qualification window, local leaderboards, and a clear pathway to Regional and World Finals — helping the sport and the wave pool industry grow together.
The issue may be that the sport’s elite, either real or fictional surfers, currently have no stake in the tour. But maybe that’s the point. The recent SIMA 2026 Surf Industry Growth Report found that the parks have meant surfing participation is changing as access expands, and consumer behaviour has shifted in ways that don't always match how the industry has traditionally operated. Surfing’s moving inland. The new Rick, or Rochelle, Kane might be out there.
