Getting Girls on Boards

With a breeze playing across the tops of waves at San Onofre State Beach, a dozen young girls with surfboards sat hunched over on the sand, eyes trained on the outside sets.

“Let’s look at the waves a few minutes. Do you see how they break?” their coach Mary Hartmann asked. “Now picture yourself inside one of those.”

The girls’ heads nodded yes in unison.

Their coach, whose brother was the late comedian Phil Hartman, wants to make a small change in the surfing world and give it a more balanced look. She wants more women on boards hitting the waves and competing for national and world titles.

Hartmann, 38, who owns Girl in the Curl in Dana Point, says women have been ignored by the traditional surfing world, and she has embarked on a challenge to introduce girls and young women to surfing.

Women represent 15% of the total United States surfing population of 1.75 million, said Lisa Hickman, a spokeswoman for the Surf Industry Manufacturers Assn. (SIMA).

The number is increasing because of strides on the professional and amateur surfing circuits, where more interest in women’s surfing has led to bigger contest purses, media coverage and lucrative sponsorships from manufacturers of women’s clothing lines for everything from sunglasses to sandals, Hickman said.

There are only about half a dozen surfing shops that specialize in equipment for women in the U.S., according to the SIMA. Annually, the surfing industry generates about $1.68 billion in business.

“Women have their own clothing now; that was the key,” said Janice Aragon, executive director of the Huntington Beach-based National Scholastic Surfing Assn., which organizes school surfing contests.

“While boys still represent the majority, this year, women’s participation has doubled at our contests,” Aragon said.

Hartmann, who sometimes speaks in surf tongues, dropping lines like “stoked” and “this rocks the house,” said getting girls interested in surfing can be challenging. But she says she likes an adventure.

“I get more and more stoked seeing girls in the water learning to surf,” she said.

Hartmann’s friends say she has always taken chances, which includes her surfing. She has ridden waves in Nicaragua, Costa Rica and other exotic places, charging waves twice her size at big-wave spots such as Todos Santos Island near Ensenada, Mexico.

But it was during a visit to Water Girl surf shop that she got the brainstorm for Girl in the Curl. At the time, Water Girl in Encinitas was the first California shop catering to the female surfer. The shop was lined with daisy-dotted surfboards and beachwear made by women for women.

Hartmann shared her idea for a store with her late brother, whom she says was a long-boarder who grew up in Westchester in Los Angeles County and surfed Malibu. Her brother, who was on TV’s “NewsRadio” sitcom and also was known for his impersonations on “Saturday Night Live,” was killed in May by his wife in a murder-suicide at their Encino home.

“My brother Phil gave me a gift to get Girl in the Curl started, and that’s how I began,” Hartmann said.

Hartmann has created a softer customer environment that caters not only to young women but their thirty-something moms. Surfboards are thinner and have pineapples and flowers as graphics while soothing Hawaiian island music plays.

“Let’s put something to rest here. Girls want something pretty. Something to match their board shorts or rash guards. Girls are really into the pretty. But it has to be functional, it has to fit well, look good and be quality stuff.”

Despite her famous brother, the only celebrities who have visited her store have been Mick Jagger and actress Julia Roberts, and they were referred by the nearby resort.

“Mick spent 45 minutes in here. He just didn’t leave, and he liked the Hawaiian music,” Hartmann said. “He shopped for his 8-year-old daughter and was accompanied by a bodyguard and driver. He was going Boogie-boarding at Salt Creek.”

Connie Andersen of Laguna Niguel recalled the day she walked into the store last summer and found Hartmann crying following the death of Phil Hartman.

“Our meeting was clearly fateful,” Andersen said. “I lost three brothers, and she had just lost hers. We bonded immediately.”

The meeting blossomed into a friendship, and now Andersen’s two daughters, Alessandra, 13, and Emily, 11, are both on the shop’s surf team.

“These girls on the team just flock to her,” Andersen said of Hartmann. “She has this positive energy that the kids just can’t get enough of. . . . Yet the energy helped her through the tragedy.”

Under Hartmann’s direction, teammates munch popcorn while watching surf videos at her shop and by habit pick up trash on the beach.

“Mary says that for every piece of trash we pick up, it will bring us a good wave the next day,” Andersen’s daughter Alessandra said.

“I like Mary because she doesn’t make you worry about being scared when you surf big waves,” Alessandra said. “Being scared is OK, that’s what Mary says.”

Alessandra’s teammate, Emily Behrle, 10, of San Juan Capistrano, said that for good luck, she slept with her surfboard before a contest.

“Mary said that you have to sleep with your board the night before a competition because it brings you good luck,” Emily said.