Though UNCW is smaller in comparison to its competitors, the UNCW Frothers Surf Club won the Red Bull Bracket Reel against 8 other college surf teams from around the nation and get to travel to Hawaii with Red Bull.
“It was really humbling to have gotten to the finals and to have won,” said Surf Team Captain, Shane Burn. “I was honestly really surprised by the amount of community support [the surf team] has gotten in these past three weeks.”
The first school that UNCW competed against was the University of Southern California and the second was the University of California, San Diego. Both of these universities have student bodies and communities that are over double the size of the population supporting UNCW’s Surf Team, so to Burn it was “really cool to beat a university of that size that’s also more recognized for their surfing.”
The UNCW Surf Team has won the East Coast Championships the past 7 out of 8 years and has been ranked as high as second nationally, so winning this competition helps solidify the idea that UNCW has a dominant surf team.
What also complements the team’s credibility is that during the past three weeks, each video the team uploaded for the bracket was chosen as the best in their bracket by Red Bull Pro-Athletes, giving them a 15 percent boost in votes.
“I think we had better quality videos than the other schools,” said Burn, “but because the contest is strictly voting it really depended completely on the support of the community. I don’t think the community would support us as much if the videos weren’t as good of quality, but our videographer, Jacob Laham, is a really excellent film student here at UNCW so he makes us look good.”
The third video the team uploaded for the bracket reel was all about the fundamentals of filming and editing surf videos.
“Our opponents did a pretty good job with their video,” said Burn. “They even used a helicopter and a Red Bull vehicle, but the actual editing was not cut as professionally. The surfing in their video also was not as exciting as some of ours so I think ours was much more fun to watch.”
Since the UNCW Surf Team won all three rounds of the Red Bull Bracket Reel, the team members involved in the competition, the videographer, and the UNCW Red Bull Student Brand Manager who helped with publicity for the competition all get to travel to Hawaii. The trip allows them to get the full “North Shore” experience with a couple of Red Bull Pro-Athletes and a Red Bull videographer who will film them surfing.
[Photos courtesy of UNCW Frothers Surf Club.]