The New Wave : Best Friends and National Champions Jessica Little, Mady Slater Offer a Preview of the Future for Surfing, Bodyboarding

The 2:05 p.m. bell rings at Ventura High and Jessica Little, 17, exits campus on the fly, running all the way home, a distance of 2 1/2 miles. Seconds later, she emerges from her house wearing a blue wet suit and carrying a seven-pound surfboard. Away she goes, dodging traffic on city streets as she runs the mile to the beach to catch as many waves as possible before darkness sends her home.

That kind of full-throttle intensity has put Little in surfing’s fast lane. The reigning U. S. girls’ champion, she is considered a strong favorite to make the U. S. team for the World Amateur championships in September in France.

“She’s definitely a dynamic surfer,” says Scott Holt, a U. S. Surfing Federation executive. “She’ll do fantastic.”

Small at 5-foot-2, Little is known for her attacking style and ability to do turns, a trick most women haven’t mastered.

But her most valuable maneuver may be the way she finesses the opposite sex. Surfing is a male-dominated sport, and it is not for the shy or the inept. Even men have trouble getting waves on the crowded breaks in Southern California. But with an engaging, unpretentious personality and a precocious gift for surfing, Little has become one of only a handful of female surfers in Ventura who are able to surf male turf at such hot spots as Surfer’s Point and The Pipe.

“She’s put in a lot of hours and earned everyone’s respect,” says surfer Mike Ellis of Ventura.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that male surfers bow politely and let her cut in line. She has to compete on their terms, using her powerful paddling prowess to reach a wave first.

“You can’t sit there and be all meek,” she says. “You have to paddle around people and get in position on the inside.”

Little, who has been surfing competitively nearly six years, is a familiar face to locals. But to outsiders, she is just another surfer taking up space. “Sometimes,” she says, “some dork out there” will try to intimidate her “snaking”--suddenly dropping in on her wave and taunting her.

“They’ll say, ‘You’re a girl, you can’t surf,’ ” Little says.

Little loves close encounters of the obnoxious kind because they usually end with her taking control of the wave and showing the boys moves they have only dreamed about. These moments of revenge are transcendent.

“That’s the highlight,” she says with a giggle.

But Little misses female companionship on the ocean. “I’d like to see other girls,” she says. “Sometimes, a mystery girl comes out and will be real good, but some of the girls I do see surfing are just in it for the boys.”

It seems only natural that Little, daughter of a sea-urchin diver, has become an urchin of the sea. She got her love of the water from her father, Rockne. Her athletic moxie came from her mother, Griselle, a hard-core marathon runner.

“I think Jessica is a bit brainwashed by my Spartan ways,” Griselle says.

Jessica’s twin brother Alex also played a major role in shaping her surfing career. An outstanding surfer himself, Alex got into the sport when he was 10 and taught his sister, but they quickly developed a rivalry.

“She is extremely competitive,” her mother said.

Little was a promising gymnast until she was 12, when she traded in the beam for the board and began entering surf contests. It was Alex who gave Jessica the confidence to compete, although it came in a backhanded way.

“He told me, ‘Oh, the girls suck,’ ” she said.

After winning numerous local and regional contests, Little put it all together at the USSF nationals in December in Port Aransas, Tex., winning her heats to take the girls’ title. In what friends say is typical of her unassuming attitude, she did not bother to check the final results after her last heat and went back to her room, where she fell asleep. She wound up sleeping through the awards ceremony, learning she won only after friends woke up her.

“I didn’t even know they gave out awards,” Little says.

Little is so focused on surfing that she quit competing in school sports--she played girls’ varsity soccer as a sophomore--and nearly quit doing schoolwork too.

“I messed around and didn’t take school seriously, but I’m kind of motivated now,” says Little, who is attending night school “to make up some classes.”

When she graduates next year, she has no doubt about her plans: She will turn pro. “Traveling around and doing what you love is insane,” she says. “And they pay you money too.”

But Little also is pragmatic.

“If I’m not good enough, I’ll go to college,” she says. A certified scuba diver since age 12, she also wants to work with her father, who is currently diving for sea cucumbers in Bodega Bay.

Although Little and her classmate, national amateur women’s bodyboarding champion Mady Slater (see accompanying story), have given Ventura High the right to be called “Surf High, USA,” the girls receive little attention at school. In fact, they got no official recognition aside from a page in the yearbook.

“It would have been kind of embarrassing if they announced it,” Slater says.

While Little has enjoyed good fortune on the water, it has been a different story on land. At a contest in January in Santa Cruz, she ran to the edge of a small cliff with her surfboard when an unexpected monster wave broke over the top, knocking her down and dislocating her left shoulder. Other surfers had laid back cautiously, but “Jessica’s always been a daredevil,” her mother says.

By spring break, her shoulder had recovered but her confidence hadn’t. So she went back to the cliff--”I had to go,” she says--and did her trademark flip into the water from the same spot where the wave had pounded her.

In May, her helter-skelter approach resulted in another injury. Running through downtown Ventura with her surfboard, she tripped over a curb and sustained a severe ankle sprain, necessitating an air cast. She was told to stay off the water for three weeks.

“Not surf for three weeks? They were joking, right?” Little says.

The day after the accident, the air cast came off, adhesive tape was wound around the discolored ankle, and she got a ride to the beach for an afternoon of surfing.

At least she didn’t run.