While she still enjoys chasing the big waves and barrels she is renowned for, Hawaii surfer Rochelle Ballard regrets that women pro surfers today don’t get to compete in contests on Oahu’s famed North Shore the way she did during the peak of her career, from 1990 to 2004, when she placed runner-up for the women’s world title.

“The North Shore is the ultimate proving ground of surfing, what I aspired to when I was in high school,” Ballard said. And inspired by Hawaii big-wave veterans Rell Sunn, Lynne Boyer and Margo Oberg, the Kauai youngster soon found herself competing in the Women’s Triple Crown of Surfing at Maui’s Honolua Bay and Oahu’s Haleiwa and Sunset beach parks.

The next generation had North Shore opportunities, too: at age 16, Hawaiian surfer Carissa Moore won the 2008 WTCS Reef Hawaiian Pro at Haleiwa, a qualifying series competition for a place on the world championship tour. In 2009, Moore qualified for the tour, where she has won four world titles and a place on the four-member U.S. surf team that will compete in the sport’s Olympic debut in Tokyo this summer.

“These girls don’t have that opportunity anymore,” Ballard said of today’s up-and-coming contenders: there’s now only one women’s pro contest in Hawaii, the championship tour closer on Maui, while on Oahu’s North Shore the men have five events, four of which are qualifying events that offer crucial opportunities to local athletes lacking resources to travel to qualifiers on the mainland and abroad.

This disparity is the reason Ballard testified in favor of City Council Resolution 20-12, which urges the city Department of Parks and Recreation and the state Department of Land and Natural Resources to adopt new rules ensuring gender equity in all North Shore surf competitions awarded city and state permits.

That means if you don’t have a women’s division in your competition, you don’t get a permit, said Councilwoman Heidi Tsune­yoshi, who introduced Resolution 20-12, which the Council passed on Jan. 29.

TSUNEYOSHI, whose district includes the North Shore, said the idea took shape when “some of the North Shore residents who’ve been involved in surfing competition for a long time came forward, informing me how disheartening it was that for the past 10 years there’s been no qualifying women’s heats, and asking me to correct this situation.”

As a non-surfer, Tsune­yoshi said she hadn’t been aware of “the level of inequity out there,” but supports women surfers as “fighting the same fight” that produced Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, the nondiscrimination law written by late Hawaii Congresswoman Patsy Mink.

She said she’s now working on a bill based on the resolution that she aims to introduce this session.

At the Jan. 29 hearing, about 30 people testified in writing and/or in person, all but one in support of the resolution.

In addition to surfers of all ages, supporters included surfers’ parents and grandparents and veteran North Shore waveriders such as Betty Depolito, who organizes a big-wave women’s contest at Waimea Bay, and former pro bodyboarder Carol, who teared up as she spoke of 2020 as the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment giving women the right to vote, as well as the first year a Hawaiian woman will have a chance to win gold for America in the Olympics.

Such chances will diminish without Hawaii competitions for women, warned Keala Kennelly, the Kauai native who won the World Surf League Big Wave Challenge at Peahi in 2018 and was the first woman invited to surf in the Eddie Aikau Big Wave Invitational at Waimea Bay.

“I came to Hawaii from Guam because I thought I would have more opportunities here,” said Irie Fitzgerald, 16. “All I want is to surf in the (Volcom) Pipe Pro (a qualifying event),” said the regular Pipeline surfer, “but boy groms (young novice surfers) grow up to surf in the Pipe Pro while girls just watch from the beach.”

Several who gave testimony cautioned they wanted women’s divisions to be added to North Shore events without adding competition days, respecting North Shore residents’ concerns about traffic and the public’s right to enjoy the surf breaks.

More competition days will not be a possibility, said Michele Nekota, director of the parks department, which issues permits.

“We would definitely encourage the surf organizers to run both women’s and men’s events, but it’s tough to run (both) within four competition days (per event), and only 16 total days per beach park,” Nekota said, adding that “they’d have to do some creative work.”

She added that any change in current permitting rules would have to go up for public hearing and, because North Shore surf meet permits now have a triennial calendar, new rules couldn’t be implemented until the 2021-2022 season.

The only testimony that didn’t support Resolution 20-12 was submitted in writing by Jodi Wilmott, former Hawaii manager for WSL, who now works for a nonprofit, Surfing Hawaii.

“These rules have the potential to either elevate or undermine not only progress in the area of gender equity in professional surfing, but also opportunity across the board at every level of the sport,” Wilmott wrote.

Asked for specifics, Wilmott replied that female competition ‘was mandated’ alongside men’s competition in professional surfing about two decades ago.

But over time, she noted, “Some of the effects included a downgrading of events so that existing sponsorship funds could accommodate both divisions within existing budgets.”

In addition, when it comes to competition days allotted per event, “Hawaii has the most restrictive time requirements of just about anywhere in the world,” Wilmott said, noting that adding a 5th day to the Vans Triple Crown of Surfing events at Haleiwa and Sunset beach parks “would go a long way to helping establish balance.”

WSL has taken strides to level the playing field for women and men, adding the big-wave championship at Peahi for women in 2016, and instituting equal prize money for both sexes in 2019, a decision Moore praised in an interview with the Star-Advertiser after winning the first Freshwater Pro in the artificial waves of WSL’s inland facility at Lemoore, Calif., in 2018.

The young pro, whose father used to sneak her into boys-only meets and who was dubbed “Queen of the Groms” at 14 after besting more than 60 top Hawaii boy surfers in a 2007 Hale­iwa contest, praised WSL for “all the opportunities they’ve given us to surf bigger, better waves and all the things they’ve done to elevate women and surfing in general.”

Moore, who has announced she’s taking a sabbatical from the pro tour this year, was unavailable to comment on the Council resolution, but she has in past interviews noted both the lack of opportunities for women to practice at overcrowded Pipeline, and her confidence that, if they get adequate practice time in bigger waves there, women are capable of excelling at Pipeline pro events. She and other women have demonstrated mastery in similar big, perilous, barreling waves from Fiji to Bali, and women’s divisions share the same surf breaks with men’s divisions in WSL events at Jeffreys Bay, South Africa; Bell’s Beach, Australia; Supertubos, Portugal; and elsewhere.

In other words, in just about every other place besides Hawaii, men’s and women’s pro competitions happen side by side.

ASKED if gender equity in surf meet permitting would also mean that an existing women’s event, like Betty Depolito’s Waimea contest, would have to add a men’s division, “yes, that is correct,” said Nathan Serota, spokesman for the parks department.

“I could have a men’s division in my contest,” Depolito said. “We had one scheduled for the first year we had a permit, three years ago; we called it ‘The Uninvited,’ for the guys who weren’t included in the Eddie.”

Due to lack of adequate waves, her Waimea event has yet to be held, she said “but to me it’s not just about the pro surfing, it’s all the people pulling permits who just forget about the girls.”

For example, the Menehune contest at Haleiwa for ages 6-12 has three age group divisions for boys versus two for girls, Depolito said.

“It used to be (said) that women weren’t good enough or didn’t hold the value (for media and sponsors),” Ballard said of an assumption belied by photos of Sunn, Boyer and Oberg surfing mountainous waves in the 1970s and ’80s, “but today, there’s such a strong presence of women surfing and the performance level is so high.”

Now, she added, “we have our four-time world champ, Carissa, doing such an incredible job, the epitome of Hawaiian surfing and aloha, and she can’t even showcase her surfing on the North Shore.”