Instructor count exceeds available waves as beginner economy absorbs entire Southern California coastline

MANHATTAN BEACH, CALIFORNIA – Economic analysis of the Southern California coastal recreation sector has concluded that the surf instruction industry has now grown larger than the activity it instructs, with more certified instructors operating in the region on a summer Saturday than there are rideable waves.

The finding places the sector in a small category of industries, alongside management consultancy, that have successfully decoupled from their subject matter.

The Instructor to Wave Ratio Has Crossed One

Researchers counted operating instructors between Ventura and Dana Point on a representative July Saturday and compared this to the number of waves breaking in the beginner zone during the same six hour window.

The resulting ratio was 1.4 instructors per wave. In three locations the ratio exceeded 3.0, which the study classifies as a saturated market and which observers on the beach classified as a group of adults in matching rash guards standing in waist deep water having a meeting.

The ocean has a fixed supply, said economist Nadine Okonjo-Bright. The instruction sector does not. That gap is where the entire business model lives. You cannot manufacture waves but you can absolutely manufacture the belief that a person requires supervision to approach one.

The Ninety Minute Lesson Deconstructed

The standard beginner lesson runs ninety minutes at a regional average of one hundred and forty dollars. The study broke down how that time is spent.

Fourteen minutes are spent on the sand, during which the student lies on a board on dry land and performs a pop-up. This is genuinely useful and constitutes the only instruction that occurs.

Eleven minutes are spent on wetsuit logistics, most of it in a car park, some of it silently.

Thirty-one minutes are spent standing in the whitewater waiting. Nine minutes are spent paddling. Four minutes are spent in what the study calls active riding, of which roughly forty seconds involve the student being upright.

The remaining twenty-one minutes are unaccounted for and are attributed by researchers to a category listed as the instructor telling a story about Indonesia.

The Certification Layer Is Where the Real Money Went

The sector’s fastest growing segment is not lessons. It is instructor certification.

Courses now exist to certify people to teach surfing, along with advanced courses to certify people to certify people to teach surfing. Water safety and lifesaving standards are genuinely maintained by serious organisations including the American Red Cross, and coastal safety guidance is published by the United States Lifesaving Association, both of which do essential work that has been quietly appended to a marketing pipeline.

There is now a four day residential course, said Okonjo-Bright, that certifies you to teach a nine year old to stand up on foam in sixty centimetres of water. It costs one thousand two hundred dollars. It has a waiting list.

Observations From the Beginner Zone

• Every group lesson contains one student who stands up on the first wave and is thereafter resented by the group, the instructor, and to some degree the ocean.
• The most valuable thing any instructor provides is the sentence you are fine, delivered at the correct moment.
• Nobody has ever learned to surf in a lesson. People learn to surf in the two hundred hours afterwards, alone, badly, and for free.
• The corporate team building surf day is the single most expensive way yet devised for eleven adults to be cold together.
• Surfing is one of the only sports where the entire equipment requirement can be met for under two hundred dollars and the instruction can cost four thousand.

What the Industry Actually Sells

The study’s conclusion is that surf schools are not in the education business. They are in the permission business, and the permission business in Southern California is enormous.

Most first time surfers are not afraid of the water. They are afraid of the car park, the lineup, the unspoken rules, and the possibility of being visibly wrong in public in front of people who look like they belong there. The lesson does not teach surfing. It buys ninety minutes of legitimate presence, and legitimate presence is the scarcest commodity on the entire coastline.

Viewed that way, one hundred and forty dollars is arguably underpriced, which is a sentence the industry would very much like everybody to stop reading now.

The broader economy of selling people access to things that were already free is a permanent assignment at Bohiney Magazine, and the British version, involving a members club, a waiting list and a pond, is documented at The London Prat.

Bookings for August are reported to be strong.

The Second Lesson Almost Never Happens

The industry’s own conversion data contains a figure it does not advertise: the overwhelming majority of beginners never book a second lesson.

Roughly seventy percent take one lesson and stop. Of the remainder, most take a second within a fortnight and then stop. The number who progress to a fourth lesson is small enough that several operators do not track it, and the number who go on to surf independently for a year is smaller still.

Okonjo-Bright said this is not a failure of instruction. The lesson is not designed to produce surfers, she said. It is designed to produce an afternoon. It succeeds at that constantly, and it is priced as though it were producing surfers, which is where the margin comes from and which nobody involved is ever going to say out loud at a trade show.

More of the same energy at The Daily Mash.

SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/