Family rides wave of success to crest of youth surfing world

Ocean City’s Mia, Brynn Gallagher on USA Junior Olympic Team

By CRAIG D. SCHENCK/Sentinel staff

OCEAN CITY — USA Surfing has named two Ocean City teens to its Junior Olympic Team, just in time to see one of their role models win the first gold medal in the sport at the Tokyo Summer Olympics.

Their journey to the top was short on time but long on miles and took the efforts of the entire family. 

Mia and Brynn Gallagher have been surfing since 2014 and competitively only since 2017 yet have had a tremendous amount of success in that short time.

Kristin Gallagher, the girls’ mother, said they made the Junior Olympic Team through USA Surfing, which holds qualifying series throughout the year and takes results from the National Scholastic Surfing Association. The snag? The competitions generally are held in California and Hawaii.

She said Brynn, 13, won the NSSA national title this past year in the girls division, while Mia, 15, finished second by .04 points in the women’s division, losing out to a seven-time national title holder from Hawaii whose father is a professional surfer.

“She came so close,” Gallagher said, noting Mia won the East Coast title for both girls and women. “They both had some pretty awesome results this year.”

The girls seem to have gotten their athleticism from their parents. Their father, Chad Gallagher, has always been a surfer and Kristin is a runner who played college basketball. She is not, however, a surfer.

“I always joke because walking to the beach lugging whatever stuff behind the kids, someone will inevitably say ‘Do you surf?’ and I will say, ‘No, I serve,’” Gallagher said.

‘They just got hooked’

Gallagher said “the crazy train” started in 2014 when they were living in Chester County, Pa.

“We were both working from home but spending pretty much every week trying to figure out the game plan to get down to the shore for the weekend, and what started out coming every weekend in the summer bled into the shoulder seasons and pretty soon we were just coming every weekend,” Gallagher said. “When the girls were in first and third grade, we moved here full time and that’s when they started surfing.”

Gallagher said it started out with Chad just pushing them into waves. 

“It was more of a lifestyle thing,” she said, noting her husband spent summers on the island his whole life.

It wasn’t long before Mia started hearing about surf contests and wanted to try it. Brynn followed suit.

“They just got hooked,” Gallagher said.

She said she and her husband have exposed the girls to a lot of different activities, sports and the arts but always had to push them to participate. Not so with surfing.

“We didn’t set out to have them be surfers, but I think the reason they have become so good is because they love it,” Gallagher said. “They really love it. We’re not telling them to go out and practice surfing. We’re like ‘Hey, why don’t you come in? You’re getting too much sun. Why don’t you take a break?’

Brynn said it’s hard to stop surfing, even for a little bit.

“I just love being in the water, especially when I’m surfing with my sister and my dad, and I love that it’s never the same,” she said. “Every wave is always different. It’s really cool to just love something so much and do it all the time.”

Mia attributes her and her sister’s success to pushing each other to achieve.

“I think a lot of practice and hard work, that’s all that really gets you to where you want to be,” Mia said. “I want to be better and having my sister push me just makes us both want to work harder.”

Gallagher said it seems that she and her husband are just along for the ride.

“They are driving the train themselves and they are loving every minute of it. I think that’s why they’ve gotten so good is because it’s really coming from within them,” she said.

It’s a family affair

All the skill in the world won’t help a girl win a surfing contest without her family’s support, and in this case it has taken an astounding effort featuring hours in a car and on a plane, weeks in hotels and multiple East Coast and cross-country trips — much during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Most of the kids on the team are from California and Hawaii, so it’s not such a huge commitment because their parents can hop them in the car and get them to places, for the most part. But for us, being from New Jersey, it was a significant undertaking for the whole family,” Gallagher said.

The competition circuit is a challenge and one Gallagher said they are still learning to navigate.

She said the first year, in 2017, they traveled to Hawaii with the Eastern Surfing Association (ESA) All-Star Team for a couple of weeks.

“They did that for two years in a row and the last trip was February of last year and right after that they shut down travel all together,” Gallagher said.

They had been traveling to Florida four or five times a year for East Coast contests at New Smyrna Beach. Then as part of USA Surfing, they were training in California.

“We do a fair amount of traveling for sure,” she said in quite the understatement.

Gallagher said Brynn had made the junior development team for Team USA in 2019 and had a lot of travel opportunities, so the family decided to enter both girls in a homeschool program and head out on tour.

Being big advocates of education, the parents were wary of taking their children out of the traditional education setting. 

“We were a little weak in the knees about doing it but we said we would give it a try to do this homeschooling program,” Gallagher said, explaining that it allowed them to travel to competitions.

As it turned out, it was a terrific decision because the girls already were learning remotely when the COVID-19 pandemic hit in early 2020.

“We found a great program and we gave it a try, and then of course in March of that year COVID made the world go crazy and we ended up coming out smelling like roses,” Gallagher said.

The girls were doing dual enrollment with Rowan University so they were taking college-level courses as part of their curriculum.

“They were doing so well with it that last year when no one really went back to school, we allowed them to stay in the program another year,” Gallagher said. “So, they basically had about two years of college courses under their belt during the two years of COVID.”

That advanced education has allowed both girls to move ahead a year at school. Mia should be rising sophomore and Brynn a rising eighth-grader but Mia will instead head back to school as a junior and Brynn will be joining her at Ocean City High School as a freshman.

“I’m a huge proponent of school. My husband and I really are both really big into education and that comes first no matter what,” Gallagher said. “So, we felt like it was a really big risk doing what we did but in the end it worked out for the best.”

She did say, however, that she will be happy to have the girls back in a traditional setting.

“I feel like there’s a lot of value in school that’s not just academic,” she said.

Working from ‘home’

Another way the family was ahead of the wave amid the COVID crisis is that both parents have long worked from home, “so when everybody went to work from home during COVID, that was like our normal routine,” Gallagher said.

They both work in the pharmaceutical industry, Chad as a project manager and Kristin as director of sales.

She said when they were in Hawaii, they had to get up at odd hours to work East Coast time.

“We were there for two weeks last year and we were getting up at 1:30 every day to work,” Gallagher said, noting it’s a bit better in California, where they could sleep until 4:30 a.m.

“It seems like we’re just globetrotting but it can get pretty grindy for Mom and Dad,” she said. “The good news is the days are really long when we’re working because we are done super early in the local day, but we’re exhausted and ready for bed by 8 o’clock at night.”

Competing with the best

Surfing just made its Olympic debut and 28-year-old Carissa Moore of Hawaii became the first woman ever to win a gold medal in her sport at Tsurigasaki Beach in Chiba province, 40 miles from Tokyo. 

Gallagher said under the guidelines of USA Surfing and the NSSA, the highest level of amateur competition is 18 and under. 

She pointed out the young age of her daughters, saying “they’re really just starting to get their engines revved up” while also noting that many of their competitors have been surfing since they were 4 or 5 years old.

“Our kids are playing a little catch-up in terms of that experience that you get from a lot of competing,” Gallagher said. “As parents we’re learning as we go and they are learning too.”

The busy mother said even though her daughters are close in age, they are really supportive of each other — when it comes to surfing. Not so much with other things.

“They fight over clothes, they fight over everything else, but they really are good to each other when it comes to surfing,” Gallagher said. “They have wars over who’s taking up more room in the backseat of the car when we’re on road trips.”

Brynn said she doesn’t just want to compete but wants to win.

“I just love the feeling of winning and training really hard for that feeling,” she said.

Brynn said she generally rides waves that are 5 to 8 feet during competitions, noting it can be frightening at times but “you get used to it.”

“I love the adrenalin,” she said, noting one of her dreams is to surf at Teahupo’o in Tahiti. “That’s a pretty solid wave.”

Mia agreed that surfing can be intimidating.

“To get out of your comfort zone is always a little bit scary,” Mia said, noting size, power and break all play a part in a wave’s destructive ability. 

She said she always does some research and talks to friends about their experiences at top spots around the country.

“They’ll usually help me out and let me know what’s good and what’s bad,” Mia said.

Brynn said she really has enjoyed the ride.

“It’s really cool because we’ve made so many memories and traveled so many places, and I am just really grateful for that because without the support of my parents I never would have had this opportunity,” she said.