Jacob Willcox, a winner at Newcastle. Photo: Hannah Anderson//World Surf League
Jacob Willcox of Australia and Francisca Veselko of Portugal just won the first event of the 2025 Challenger Series schedule, the Burton Automotive Newcastle Surfest. They have 10,000 points in the rankings bank available to cash in at the end of the season for a ticket to the 2026 Championship Tour. If this were 2024, Willcox would need less than 4,500 more points over the remainder of the season to qualify. The gap would be a little tougher to close for Veselko, who needs another 13,665 points to match what last year’s fifth-ranked and final qualifier, Vahine Fierro racked up.
So, should either athlete start making travel plans for the 2026 CT? In the four years the Challenger Series has been the World Surf League’s filter circuit to the big dance, I’ve been curious how far a single win would take an athlete. Without ever actually studying the results and the rankings of the Challenger Series year-by-year, I’ve held this general assumption that one win could float you to a spot on the CT — not necessarily an automatic lock for qualifying, but a big enough head start that a CS event winner could just show up and win a heat here and there and coast into the CT.
After digging through the results, here are the trends that I saw.
CT Surfers In CS Events Were Cannibalizing the Whole Thing Early On
When the CS was introduced as a filter tour for the CT, Championship Tour surfers were actually required to compete in regional events. The intent was to raise the level of competition within the Challenger Series field and in theory that was a great plan. If you want to shorten the learning curve for a minor league baseball player jumping up to the big leagues, why not show him a few 100 mph fastballs and a nasty high-80s slider? Iron sharpens iron. To be the best you’ve gotta beat the best. You get the picture.
But the first two years of the Challenger Series was basically just CT surfers dominating the field and chewing up qualification points that would otherwise go to surfers battling for qualification. In 2021, the first year of the CS, Zeke Lau was the only non-CT surfer to win a CS event on the men’s side. The trend was the other way around on the women’s side. All four event winners went on to the Championship Tour, including a 16-year-old standout from O-Side who would pass on the CT, stay in school, and win a world title just a few years later (Caity Simmers).
In 2022, Callum Robson, Gabriel Medina, and John John Florence won three of the seven men’s CS events. Leo Fioravanti, Rio Waida (two) and Zeke Lau won the others and all three qualified. Things were a touch different from the women’s perspective, which saw seven different event winners from wire to wire, and all seven held the top seven positions in the end of season rankings. Only the top five were elevated to the CT, so no, a win didn’t guarantee qualifying for the CT, but a win was definitively a prerequisite for the women who did.
2023: Win or You’re Not In
The 2023 Challenger Series had seven events following that year’s mid-year cut and it was the year that the Challenger Series was truly given over to Challenger Series surfers. The field for each event was dropped from 96 to 80 on the men’s side and 64 to 48 on the women’s side. A major change that allowed for those reductions was to abolish the requirement that active CT surfers (those who made the mid-season cut) were no longer required to surf in CS events.
Only one surfer from either side of the CS won an event that year without breaking above the CT qualification line by the end of it all: Erin Brooks, who was 16-years old when she won that year’s Corona Saquarema Pro.
Cole Houshmand and Samuel Pupo won two men’s events a peice that year. Eli Hanneman’s US Open win accounted for 47 percent of his season points and he finished the year fifth in the rankings (qualified). Deivid Silva won the Ericeira Pro, which accounted for 58 percent of his point total at the end of the season — just enough to finish 990 points ahead of CS number 11 Micheal Rodrigues and earn his spot on the next year’s Championship Tour.
2024: A Different Story
If a Challenger Series win in 2022 or 2023 was all but a prerequisite to qualify in the following year, the 2023 CS season was more of a crap shoot for event winners.
Technically, three event winners also went on to be CT qualifiers from the men’s side that season, but you could argue a fourth (Alan Cleland) whose US Open win propelled him to the 11th spot in the CS rankings. It wasn’t high enough to qualify for the upcoming season officially, but when John John Florence announced he’d be taking the 2025 season away, and with Gabriel Medina sidelined indefinitely from an injury, Cleland was promoted to fill in by the League. As a rookie now in 2025, Cleland made the mid-season cut and will be holding on to a CT slot for 2026 — all without actually qualifying via the CS. But that single win accounted for 69 percent of Cleland’s total season points. In short, he wouldn’t be on tour today without that single performance in August of 2024.
On the other end of the spectrum that year, Ian Gouveia’s last event of 2024 was that same US Open of Surfing. After winning the Ballito Pro just a month earlier, the former CT vet had all but qualified heading to Huntington Beach an equal 9th locked him in.
Macy Callaghan was the only woman to win an event and not qualify for this year’s CT. She did still finish 9th overall, which would get the job done on the men’s side where 10 surfers are elevated, but it was well short of the requirement on the women’s side where just five women get a promotion. Of the five women that did qualify, only four total results were lower than equal 9th the entire season. Bella Kenworthy threw one of those away, sat out the final event of the season, and still finished second on the CS. Erin Brooks (two) and Vahine Fierro held the other lower scores among qualifiers and theirs were ultimately thrown out too.
2025: Is There a Definitive Trend Yet?
No, there really isn’t. If anything, you could argue that a Challenger Series win is nearly a requirement for surfers hoping to qualify for the Championship Tour. Some athletes have qualified for the CT without winning an event in that same season, but that accomplishment is much more rare among the women — four total since 2021 — where there are usually more events than there are qualification spots available. In total, 35 of the 46 event winners have qualified for the CT. But once you consider that the other 11 non-qualifying event winners were often existing CT athletes in 2021 and 2022 (eight), then well, yeah, you’d better win a Challenger Series event if you want to book a spot on the Dream Tour.
