Chase Lieder, the 18-year-old champion surfer from Montauk, did not make it to East Hampton High’s graduation ceremonies last June because he was competing in a California contest that earned him a place on the United States’ 2024 bicoastal longboard surfing team, along with three West Coast surfers, Rachael Tilly, Kaitlin Mikkelsen, and Kevin Skvarna.
“He comes and goes — he’s working with a well-known board shaper, Michael Takayama, in Oceanside,” his mother, Lourdes Lieder, said at their family’s MTK Surf Shop on Montauk’s Main Street Saturday afternoon. “He’s the only one from the East Coast. To represent the U.S.A. in a sport is amazing — we’re super proud of him.”
“He’s a pro now,” she added. Getting a wild card entry into the World Surf League’s longboard tour last summer attested to that, she said. Meanwhile, college will have to wait.
The waves at the tour’s stops — Huntington Beach, Calif., Bells Beach in Australia, and El Salvador’s Surf City — were “not great waves for longboarding,” her son had told her. “All those stops are mostly right waves. Ditch [Plain] is a left. He’s a goofy footer, with his right foot forward, but Chase can do everything. He can do backside, when he’s opposite a right wave, and frontside, when he’s facing the wave. Frontside on left breaks and backside on right breaks. . . . They should mix it up, but they don’t.”
He was indeed right up there now, she said, competing with the best, and had been well received by the sport’s top surfers. “Oh yes, he can keep up with them — they say Chase brings energy. He was second last year at the Mexi Log Fest, in La Saladita. He got second in that event — he probably should have won — to Kai Sallas, who won the longboard tour.”
“In Mexico, he was second to him,” she repeated to herself as she summoned up a video of Lieder’s 29-second nose ride at La Saladita, a video that has attracted four million views, and which the third-place finisher, Mike Lay, has described as “mind-bending.”
The bicoastal U.S.A. longboarding team is to compete from April 18 to 25 in the International Surfing Association’s World Surfing Games at Surf City in El Salvador, a competition that can be seen live through isasurf.org. Lieder has said that “it’s super cool to be the young gun on the team,” and that his “main goal is to inspire kids, just open up their minds to go surfing and just be connected with the ocean.”
“Everything’s out of pocket,” his mother said. “Chase and the others have to pay for their travel, accommodations, food, coaching, sports medicine. . . . The organization is asking people to help them with these expenses.” Donations to Chase Lieder can be made through usasurfing.flipcause.com.
“Yes, I’d like to go, but I’m not sure,” his mother said. “Many countries will be competing. I want Morgan [Lieder’s 17-year-old sister] and her dad to go. The opening ceremony is very emotional — they just had it for the shortboard world games in Puerto Rico, in Arecibo in March. They brought sand from all the countries and mixed it. It was a beautiful ceremony. They’re going to do the same thing in El Salvador. . . .”