Fifteen Minutes in the Water

Our surf sessions currently contain about fifteen minutes of surfing.

The rest is running, squats, dry pop-ups, pretend paddling on the sand, and six children asking when they can finally get in the water. It doesn’t look much like the thing their parents signed them up for. That’s deliberate.

We moved to Mauritius about six months ago. I started teaching Noah to kitesurf the week we arrived in September. David Chan Chu did the first few lessons, then I took over. I bought a walkie-talkie set and we went out almost every day. By November we did our first downwinder together: four hours, fifty kilometres. He was eight.

In December, David ran a kids camp and something changed. The children pushed each other and progressed faster in a week than Noah had in two months alone with me. I had been concentrating on instruction. The group was doing work I couldn’t.

Some context on me: I’m a certified volleyball instructor, certified ski and snowboard instructor. I coached volleyball for over ten years and taught ski and snowboard for another ten. Always with kids. I stopped about a decade ago. Life, work, other things took over. But the instinct never left. You watch kids train and you immediately see what’s structured and what’s not.

When I looked for that kind of surf coaching here, I couldn’t find much of it.

You can buy a one-on-one lesson for 80 euros. A kid shows up, gets a foam board, catches some whitewater, goes home. And that’s it. They’re alone. No other kids around. Nobody to push them, nobody to watch and think “if she can do it, I can do it.” The whole session is one kid and one instructor, over and over.

I wanted to try the group version. Surfing made sense, especially with Lara. She’s six, has been doing weekly lessons with David, and can now stand and ride on her own. Kitesurfing is hard to share with a six-year-old. In the surf, all of us can be in the water at once.

Noah talks about it constantly. Lara beams when she paddles out. They like that I’m running it, which I know won’t last forever, so I’m taking the win.

Why the boards stay on the sand

The instinct was to get a pro coach in immediately. That’s backwards. I’ve seen this pattern in every sport I’ve coached: if you bring in high-level instruction before the kids have the physical base, they can’t execute what they’re being taught. The technique is there in theory but the body can’t do it. They get frustrated. The coach gets frustrated. Nobody progresses.

So the plan (and I talked about this with Thomas Barau, another local like David and very supportive of what we’re doing, who’ll probably come in with David once the foundation is solid) is to get the kids super fit first. Able to paddle properly. Able to do a solid, explosive pop-up. Strong enough that an hour in the water doesn’t destroy them.

That’s where we are now. Almost the entire two-hour session is strength and mobility work. We correct posture and build the movements they’ll need later. At the end they get maybe fifteen minutes of surfing, with parents in the water pushing them into waves.

It doesn’t look like surf coaching yet. It looks like a fitness class on the beach with some surfing at the end. That’s exactly what it should be at this stage.

The other parents are into it. A couple train alongside the kids. Nobody needs a pro coach for squats, pop-ups, paddling drills, and keeping six children moving on sand. The pros come later, once the kids have bodies that can use the instruction.

The group

Twice a week. Tamarin Bay. Rain or shine.

Noah, Lara, Taylor, Emy, Teo, and Ali. Ages 6 to 9. Small enough that everyone gets attention. Big enough that the group dynamic works. December made that obvious. Kids don’t get better alone. They get better when they see another kid nail something and think “I want to do that too.”

Before the first session, we set the ground rules together:

1. We arrive together, greet the coaches, and listen for the start.
2. We stay with the group on the sand and in the water.
3. We wait for coach instructions before entering the water.
4. We speak with respect and save feedback for the debrief.
5. We take care of our boards, the beach, and each other.
6. We finish properly: boards back, beach tidy, goodbye said.

The session

The structure stays the same every time. On purpose. Kids do better when they know what comes next.

1. Welcome, rules, and today’s plan: 5 min
2. Theola’s playful opener: 10 min
3. Warmup and stretch: 10 min
4. Theory on the sand: 10 min
5. Water block with one focus: 20 to 60 min
6. Debrief and goodbye: 5 min

The sand part is fixed. The water block bends with conditions. Some days Tamarin gives us clean waves; some days it gives us twenty minutes of chop. Theola’s opener changes, the drills shift, and the theory moves forward, but the water stays locked on one focus.

The ratio will flip as the kids get stronger. The frame won’t. I used the same rule coaching volleyball: change the drill, keep the frame.

The tool

I built an interactive session planner for this. You can regenerate sessions, print them, take them to the beach. It’s not a curriculum system. It’s a sheet of paper with a plan on it that a coach can glance at between sets.

The exercises

This is the land-based exercise collection: strength, mobility, balance, coordination, cardio. Each drill is tagged so the session planner can pull what the day needs.

For now, the children still count the session by the fifteen minutes they spend on their boards. I count the pop-ups before them.