SCARBOROUGH — The sun had yet to rise on a recent weekday morning as Ayla Michaud Stutzman carved and cut back beneath the crest of a breaking wave at Higgins Beach.

She was one of two dozen surfers making the most of what remained from Hurricane Ian, and the only one who had to cut short her session to get to an 8:15 high school French class.

Stutzman, 14, of Scarborough is a ninth-grader at Waynflete School in Portland. She starts in goal for the school’s girls’ soccer team. Entering the weekend, she had pitched seven shutouts and allowed only two goals all season.

Her true passion, however, is surfing, an activity she’s been doing for nearly half her life.

In June – less than a year after entering her first competition – she found herself catching waves in the Pacific Ocean off San Clemente, California, at the 2022 USA Surfing Championships. Although she didn’t advance from her initial heat of four (in the under-14 girls field of 18 surfers), she did make history.

Greg Cruse, former CEO of USA Surfing, believes that Stutzman is the first girl from Maine to ever qualify for the national championships in shortboard surfing. Nick Hutchins, also of Scarborough, did compete in the boys’ longboard division in the 2018 nationals.

Longboards are at least 9 feet long and wider with rounded noses, while shortboards are generally between 5 and 7 feet long and sport an upturned tip. Stutzman said longboards are more stable but shortboards are more fun.

“You can maneuver them a lot more easily,” she said. “There’s a free-ness to them. You have all these options.”

“Ayla is kind of a special one,” said Colin Madden, co-director of the Eastern Surfing Association and the person who first suggested she try competitive surfing at an event in August 2021 in Hampton, New Hampshire. “She loves to surf and totally has got a passion for it but she’s pretty well-rounded.”

Indeed, Stutzman is an A student with well-developed time-management skills (you can’t surf before sunrise unless you go to bed early) who plans to play basketball for Waynflete this winter and row crew in the spring. Of course, when rideable swells are in the forecast, she won’t miss a day at Higgins or Scarborough Beach no matter how low the mercury drops.

Winter, she said, actually provides better local surf conditions. It’s a matter of proper wetsuit thickness, along with mittens, booties and a hood that leaves only the face exposed.

“It’s nice because not as many people go out and there are more storms that come through,” she said of winter surfing. “We don’t get too many swells in the summer. Every two weeks there might be something little and every three weeks we might get a 4-foot storm, and maybe one 6-foot storm if we’re lucky.”

Last winter was mild from a surfing point of view, she said. The previous winter, when COVID-19 restrictions forced most classes to be held remotely, provided much more action.

“I was online, did my classes, went to surf, did another class online, then went to surf again,” she said. “I was getting in over 20 hours (on the water) every week.”

Although she watched plenty of online surfing, and reveled in the the sport making its Olympic debut in the Tokyo Games of 2021, competitions always seemed to be held in warm-weather locales such as Australia, Hawaii or California.

Her outlook changed when older sister Iris, a senior and mainstay of the Waynflete soccer team, was looking for a used surfboard and wound up buying it from Madden, who lives in Stratham, New Hampshire, and whose son Jack, 17, also qualified for nationals earlier this year.

Because not many folks in the Northeast are in the market for high-performance kids boards, Madden’s interest was piqued. Upon learning about Ayla, he suggested the Hampton event. Success there led to the ESA’s Northeast Regional competition in May in Ocean City, Maryland. Stutzman, then 13, won the under-14 category and was runner-up in U-16 girls.

That was good enough to qualify her for nationals as well as the Eastern finals in September off North Carolina’s Outer Banks, where among a field of 24 Stutzman placed second to a girl from Florida. Coming in third was Sienna Fleming, who along with her sister Lola cut their surfing teeth in Maine waters but subsequently moved to Florida.

Maddie Ryan (originally from Kennebunk) and Avery Peacock (Scarborough) are two other talented surfers from Maine who relocated to warmer climates.

Madden said budding young surfers from the Northeast have to be highly motivated to deal with the harsh conditions, and lengthy winter sessions can be wearing. Plus, there may be hesitancy to repeatedly try a new maneuver knowing a tumble into the cold water is likely. In warmer water, there are fewer such repercussions.

Travel and equipment costs also run higher for those from the Northeast, an area Madden says is mostly off the radar of the surf industry, resulting in fewer sponsorships. Stutzman currently has two sponsors, the local Black Point Surf Shop and Buell wetsuits.

At 5-foot-9, Stutzman is taller than either of her competition boards, which measure 5-foot 6 and 5-foot 4. Her stance is “goofy,” a surfing term meaning that she puts her right foot forward on the board. She and Iris learned from their father, Sunny Stutzman, who grew up in Dover-Foxcroft and was a snowboarder until moving to southern Maine and embracing surfing.

“When Ayla surfs, she surfs like the ocean owes her money,” her father said. “She’s very aggressive and attacks the wave. It’s kind of a different thing to watch.”

Sunny and Tracy Michaud (Ayla’s mom, who has since remarried) made sure Ayla learned to swim well before he took her to Higgins the summer she turned 8 for her first experience on a surfboard. Her reaction?

“I just loved it,” she said. “It’s a different feeling than any other sport. It was scary at first but after I caught my first wave I knew I wanted to do that for the rest of my life.”

Father and daughter had their first shark sighting – they figure it was a mako attacking a seal – last year while surfing at Fortunes Rock Beach in Biddeford.

“It was about 20 feet away from me,” said Ayla, who at the time was separated from her father by a wave. “It was splashing water, like 10 feet in the air. I could see its tail flip around. I was like, ‘Dad, get in!’ ”

Sunny didn’t argue. They immediately headed to shore.

“They’re always there,” Ayla said of sharks. “That’s just the one time I actually saw one, so it doesn’t scare me too much.”

Stutzman was scheduled to compete earlier this month in USA Surfing’s Prime East series in Atlantic City, New Jersey, but a lack of decent-sized waves forced postponement, at least until the first weekend of November. Also scheduled for Saturday, Nov. 5, is the Class C girls’ soccer state championship.

Of the three soccer games Stutzman missed this season because of her surfing trip to North Carolina, Waynflete lost two, against Cape Elizabeth and North Yarmouth Academy.

“It’s a hard decision,” she said of the potential conflict. “Prime East is a really big event. But then, states is also super big for Waynflete. I’ve already missed a few important games for my team and I don’t want to let them down if we make it that far.”

Carrie Earls, one of Waynflete’s two head soccer coaches, happens to be a surfer herself, so she understands. She even tuned in to the live-stream feed of Stutzman’s Eastern finals competition.

“She’s a terrific athlete, an extremely hard worker,” Earls said. “Playing goalie, like surfing, is something of a solo pursuit. Yes, she’s part of the team, but she’s the only one doing that specific skill during the game.”

Initial concerns about Stutzman missing significant time or being distracted by surfing quickly dissipated, Earls said: “Besides those games she had to miss, she’s been at everything. Never a bad attitude if the swell is up and she’s on the pitch. She’s just happy to be there, a smiley tan bubble that we love to be around.”

On the horizon is the Prime Series and the World Surf League. There’s a junior national team. Maybe she’s peaked, and maybe she’s only begun to discover her potential.

Stutzman said she isn’t sure how far surfing will take her, only that she wants to continue the ride. And now that the Olympic Games have embraced the sport? Well, she may be young, but she’s good enough to dream.

“That’s exciting,” she said. “That gives everybody so much more energy and hope for making it all the way there.”

Copy the Story Link