Molly Picklum in the 2024 Lexus Pipe Pro. Photo: WSL
Surf fans haven’t seen a Championship Tour heat since September 1, 2025. We haven’t seen Challenger Series action since October 18, 2025. That’s a pretty long offseason at the CT level and an unusually long layoff for CS surfers, but that’s what flipping the Dream Tour’s calendar around for 2026 left us with. Things finally swing back into action again next week when the current race for qualification through the Challenger Series resumes at the Lexus Pipe Pro. The World Surf League announced this week that CS surfers will have to compete against a handful of CT heavies to earn their qualification points at Pipe.
Eight Championship Tour surfers are slated to compete on the North Shore and several have solid resumes (including wins) in the Pipe Pro event.
Baron Mamiya has back-to-back Pipe Pro wins (2024, 2025) and will be defending that title. Griffin Colapinto, fresh off another top-five CT season, came within arm’s length of a Pipe Masters title early in his career. And Leo Fioravanti has finished as a runner-up at CT Pipe events twice.
The women will have to get through reigning world champion Molly Picklum, who’s placed third and second in her past two CT Pipe events. Gabriela Bryan will also be in the women’s field, adding another CT surfer with a WSL Finals (2025) on her resumé. Isabella Nicholls has surfed in each Pipe event since the women’s CT first added the wave to its annual schedule, and she’s coming off her best full season in which she barely missed the WSL Finals by less than 1,000 rankings points. And Luana Silva and Erin Brooks will round out a group of CT surfers the CS competitors will have to work through for their own qualification points.
That’s a stacked group entering a field of competitors that have just two contests to go in their own 2025-2026 CS season. Just two surfers across both the men and women have qualified for the CT so far, Portugal’s Yolanda Hopkins and France’s Tya Zebrowski.
