Alan Cleland is among a handful of surfers yet to win a heat this season. Photo: Ed Sloane//WSL
The World Surf League thrust a compromise on the Championship Tour this year. By scrapping the unpopular mid-season cut, they would shift to a first-round elimination format to better capitalize on swell windows. But as the fourth event of the season gets underway, the effects of the new format are starting to show: a rut for the surfers at the bottom of the rankings that’s getting harder to escape.
Five tour surfers — three men and two women — have lost every heat they surfed in this season. Oscar Berry, Alan Cleland, Seth Moniz, Brisa Hennessy, and Bella Kenworthy have all compiled the minimum amount of points possible. And several others have only one heat win. If you look at the 2025 rankings after four events, there weren’t any surfers who hadn’t yet passed a heat.
Of course, the previous format had two rounds of three-surfer heats — a non-elimination round followed by an elimination round. There were greater chances of advancing. If you drew a tough matchup, you didn’t have to beat them to advance.
We spoke with CT veteran Liam O’Brien last month about how the new format would change the tour, and he suspected that the rookies would struggle with fewer repetitions. While it hasn’t just been the rookies, the notion that those with less experience would be hit hardest has somewhat held.
Berry is a rookie. Cleland and Kenworthy are sophomores. If you look at the overall rankings heading into Raglan, the nine rookies across the men’s and women’s tours all found themselves in the bottom half of the rankings. But Moniz and Hennessy are veterans, also grappling with the new format.
Their seasons are still salvageable. Steph Gilmore was sitting dead last heading into Snapper, and a win launched her 16 spots into seventh in the rankings. But the non-elimination format is a vicious cycle. The worse you perform, the better surfers you draw in your heats, and there is no way of dodging them in a two-surfer match-up. Alan Cleland has had particularly bad luck, drawing Gabriel Medina (twice), Jack Robinson, and Griffin Colapinto.
If this trend continues toward the mid-way point of the new-look tour — creating hyper-defined classes of the haves and the have-nots — one could argue it resurfaces the argument for the mid-season cut. If the WSL wants to run events faster during fleeting swell windows, why feed the same surfers to the sharks for the length of an entire season?
It’s possible that those who are struggling buck the trend. After all, the beginning of the tour was right-hand heavy, and the first round at Raglan was run in hardly contestable surf. Seth Moniz and Al Cleland, for example, will surely benefit from the hollow reef breaks in the second half of the season. But, for now, the disparity between the very top and the very bottom of the tour is widening, and it’s going to be challenging for those at the bottom to dig themselves out.
Editor’s Note: After running one single round at small Manu Bay yesterday, the New Zealand Pro is on hold.
