Coach Kauli, take all my money. Photo: Screenshot
There’s a longstanding belief in professional sports that the elite of the elite make for the absolute worst coaches. The simple theory is an easy one to digest. Michael Jordan, for example, was so great and so driven that he could never relate to a younger athlete with half the talent and a fraction of the work ethic.
That theory crumbles when you watch Kauli Vaast break down surfing basics. Surfing is now simple. It is easy. He is the surf coach, online and in real life, that we all needed. Personally, I have spent most of my life sucking at this whole thing relative to the gold medal winner from Tahiti. But two 60-second videos are going to change that. Take his pre-session gameplan as an example, where Vaast gives a four-step guide to the entire sport.
“Try to go outside, get to the waves. That will be the first thing,” he says. “Then stand up good. Have a little ph-shhhheeewwww, feeling of the wave,” he adds, mimicking how hard you’re about to pump through a quarter-mile section at 25 mph.
Now that you’re loose, you’ll “do one turn, maybe two, and at the end three turns. BWOAH! Session’s done.”
Seriously, we’ve all been making surfing way too complicated all these years. Coach Kauli is the man.
Still not convinced? How about understanding the complexities of surfboards? It’s just super complex hydrodynamics at play on moving walls of energy transferred through water, after all. Coach Kauli makes it digestible for the rest of us. It’s genius. And I’m here for it.
More please, Kauli. More.
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