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

About two years ago pro surfer Evan Slater Jr. realized his kid sister Mady was not just another pretty face on the water. Surfing off Santa Rosa Island with some friends, he watched the tiny 14-year-old bodyboarder react faster than anyone when a large breaker rose from the ocean.

“Mady didn’t hesitate,” he says, “and she got the biggest wave of the day. It surprised me she had no fear. After that, I was convinced she’d go far.”

Real far. Fearless and athletic, Mady Slater has wound up going the distance, winning the 1991 national women’s amateur bodyboarding title at the U.S. Surfing Federation championships in December in Port Aransas, Tex.

Now 16 and the youngest female bodyboard competitor on the mainland, Slater shot to the top after only three years in the sport. And even though U.S. women’s bodyboarding is not on a par with countries such as Brazil, where it is immensely popular, Mary Lou Drummy, president of the Women’s International Surfing Assn., says “Mady is very much competitive with the Brazilians.”

Unfortunately, Slater will not have a chance to compare her ability with the foreigners--the World Amateur championships this fall in France only have a men’s bodyboard division. But she will be tested at this summer’s nationals in Oahu by the traditionally tough Hawaiian women, who did not compete last fall at the Texas event.

“It wasn’t that exciting to win (in Texas),” Slater says, “but I’ll be more excited to win in Hawaii because the Hawaiian women are really good and will know their home break.”

Part of Slater’s success, says her mother Fran, “is genetic”--her father once finished second in a 30-and-over national bodyboard contest--and part is a product of her dedication, a quality she doesn’t apply only to sports.

“She’s really committed in everything she does,” Evan Jr. says. “She expects to do well.”

At Ventura High, Slater will take a 4.0 grade-point average into her senior year. “She’s naturally smart but she says she has to work at it,” says Jessica Little, Slater’s best friend and the 1991 national girls’ surfing champion (see accompanying story).

Both girls train hard and long in their sports, but they admit that Slater manages her time better. “I do as much homework as possible during class and then study after bodyboarding,” Slater says, adding, “but I still manage to have fun.”

Slater seems serious and laconic with people she doesn’t know, but Little insists “she’s comedy.”

“We drive to contests together and it wouldn’t be the same without her,” Little says.

Even though the Slater family did not move to Ventura until five years ago, Mady and Little have been friends since they began competing as gymnasts in the fourth grade. They have a lot in common, including brothers who are accomplished surfers and fathers with an affinity for the water.

Evan Sr., an oncologist, has coached his daughter since she gave up gymnastics three years ago, complaining of stress. During her first six months on the water, she floundered.

“She had no sense of riding the waves,” her father says. “Learning about the waves was the hard part. But then she made the most extraordinary improvement. You could see she’d be something important.”

Using the upper-body strength and agility she had developed in gymnastics, Slater is able to do big maneuvers on big waves. But because so few women compete as bodyboarders, Slater often has to enter open contests, earning her stripes against men.

“The first time she entered one of these contests,” Evan Sr. says, “you could see the guys laughing. But they were shaking their heads when she beat 14 of them and finished second.”

But men intimidate the 5-foot Slater. “I get kind of psyched out when I go against guys,” she says. “I’m trying to work that out now.”

Although her brothers Evan Jr., 20, and Dylan, 10, are surfers, Slater wasn’t influenced by them. She never tried surfing “because I started bodyboarding and just kept doing it.”

And her brothers haven’t tried to convert her.

“I let her evolve into what she wanted to be,” says Evan Jr., a junior at UC San Diego.

Bodyboarders get teased for riding truncated foam boards and wearing fins. And they don’t even stand up on the board, lying instead on their stomachs and doing maneuvers with names like “spinner” and “el rollo.”

But Slater, who usually practices near Ventura’s South Jetty at the mouth of the Santa Clara River, reports that she has been immune to any kind of intra-surfing rivalry. “I never get any hassles,” she says.

In fact, she offers, “I’ve had a lot of fun. I like everything about (bodyboarding). It’s never boring.”