Wave Pool Mag

The Coachella Valley Surf Club emerged hot on the heels of a handful of wave pool announcements for the desert east of Los Angeles. What started as an organization to introduce desert kids to the wonders of surfing has evolved into a philanthropic exercise to provide scholarships to students at the Desert Mirage High School in Thermal.Dave Hilts runs the organization and tell us, “Well, you know, the Coachella is very diverse socio-economically. And you have a mix of extremely wealthy people here. And then you have the East Valley, Coachella, in the school that I've been working with, you've got basically, the sons and daughters of farm workers and service workers. So you have a very diverse culture of people and incomes. That is where we've been focusing. Our efforts are in the East Valley where the kids could use the most help.”Drop into this fascinating micro-culture of desert surf in this latest episode…

Andy Hadden is pumped. We're sitting on the edge of the wave pool that he spent over a decade bringing to life. Today, all those blueprints, civic meetings and artist renders have disappeared into the ether to be replaced by the real, three-dimensional entity that is Lost Shore Surf Resort. In this episode we pick Andy's brain to uncover the surprises one can expect in the magic place when your dream goes from concept to concrete. 

On site at Revel Surf in Mesa Arizona earlier this month we spoke with COO Adam Saks – a creative hospitality veteran who brings a refreshing New York realness to his work. It was pre-opening and Maricopa County was running through its final inspection list (spoiler alert, they passed and are open as of today.) Adam walks us through the Cannon Beach journey, which many of us are familiar with, but really piqued our interest with his innovative take on how surf invigorates a space. Here, in the stripmall-landia of the greater Phoenix area, a wave pool radically distinguishes a destination which rolls over into higher retail occupancy and rates. “Our rents in this 30 acres are a bit more than those across the street. It just is. And that's not a secret. Prospective tenants could go and call upon the real estate broker for the retail space across the street, and they can call our broker and they will get two different numbers. What we have found is that we're 100% leased. So people here are willing to pay a premium rent to open their business close to the water. Like I said, what Cannon Beach is going to be in a couple of years with everything that we're bringing to this corner and the fact that very little of that exists in Southeast Mesa. Entertainment is about everything in one place. That's what the world has become.”

Jonas Boehm-Tettelbach is an imposing figure. He's Lurch height with a backwoodsy hairstyle and beard – put him in greasy overalls and he could be cast as a moonshiner in a Tarantino film. However, his manner is the furthest thing from Duck Dynasty bravado. Jonas speaks in a quiet, measured tone. And, it turns out, he also knows his shit.Having been with this wave pool project alongside his father, he's seen it all during the evolution of O2 SURFTOWN MUC from concept to concrete – a process which took five-and-a-half years (a relatively short time when compared to many other surf park projects.) In this podcast Jonas shares some of those hard-earned insights, the kind that can only be learned by bringing Germany's first wave pool to life.

Joaquín Lozada and Ezequiel Fernandez Lobo from La Ola Group, based in Argentina, are spearheading a technology that uses underwater air cannons to generate surf. The company plans to build their first wave pool adjacent a famous church just outside of Buenos Aires. If successful, their technology will rub shoulders with some of the major players in the highly competitive wave generation game.

There are only a handful of people on the planet with as much wave design experience as Cheyne Magnusson. He’s part of an obsessed, laser-focused elite squad of wave designers - individuals who can take a multi-million dollar piece of equipment and shape waves. His journey started nearly a decade ago when he was at Body Glove and the boss asked, “what can we do with wave pools?” He went on to shape the wave program at Waco, create the Palm Springs Surf Club and now, as we learned, branch out into more new projects (spoiler alert, he names locations). We joined him in Palm Springs on location at the newly re-opened Palm Springs Surf Club.

Jessica Mahoney’s professional life has crossed paths with WavePoolMag a few times now, first at ADG and later as COO at Surf Park Summit. Over the years, she has amassed a databank of knowledge in the industry from the tech side to the consumer side and all points in between. We had a nice long chat with Jessica to discover what wave pool operators can do to improve their business through facility offerings, amenities, seasonality planning, branding, and much more. Dig in for an accelerated learning package in this latest WavePoolMag podcast.

Philip Roberts is always in close orbit to surfing’s greatest inventors. Mentored by water park guru Dick Croul (Wild Rivers) he’s brought the ideation of Tom Lochtefeld to life while acting as the grounding cable for Boogie Board inventor Tom Morey. In the late ‘80s, Surfer Mag offered him a project to paint, as they put it, “the future of surfing.” The gig was for an illustrator to bring a floating reef concept to life. From there he expanded into futuristic wave pool designs, much of which has become the blueprint for concepts we still see today. We wanted to pick Phil's brain to learn how he consciously or unconsciously seeded the future look of surf parks.

John Philbin’s best-known movie parts were in Children of the Corn, Tombstone, Point Break and, of course, The North Shore - that classic 1980s film about an Arizona wave pooler who goes to Hawaii. In this podcast, John talks about how he landed the role of Turtle (hint: he had to audition 7 times) and the movie’s lasting effect on a generation. As a core surfer he’s also well-placed to measure changes to surfing and the “life” many have sacrificed so much to be a part of and speak to how wave pools, surfing and their overall perception have shifted within popular culture. “You don't you don't have to be a bum to be a surfer anymore. I was telling my friends that you can be rich and be a surfer. It's a thing that's happened. The game is out man, but it used to be like, “yeah, I'm going to sacrifice everything in my life for this feeling of riding energy in the water.” And that's what it used to be like when I was a kid. You used to have to be a lifeguard or a firefighter to be a surfer. Now, you can put in hours and be a CEO of a company and be a surfer. You look at Mark Zuckerberg or someone and you're like, fuck, you know? Are you kidding me? Yeah. The richest man in the world, what he really wants to do is ride a wave because he’s discovered what we’ve known all along.”

There’s a mantra in the wave pool space that the development, opening and operation of parks will get easier as more facilities open up. That’s why the unveiling of URBNSURF Sydney is a pretty big deal. The launch makes the URBNSURF group the only entity to have two surf parks in operation. We wanted to find out if the company simply copy/pasted Melbourne to a new location or if they had to start from scratch. Was it easier this time around? We spoke with the one person most qualified to answer this question, URBNSURF Sydney GM Shaun Hutchinson.