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, and Noah started kitesurfing the week we arrived in September. David Chan Chu did the first few lessons, then I took over, bought a walkie-talkie set, and we went out almost every day. In November we did our first downwinder together: four hours, fifty kilometres. He was eight.

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

For the record, I’ve done this before. I’m a certified volleyball instructor and a certified ski and snowboard instructor. I coached volleyball for over ten years and taught skiing and snowboarding for another ten, always with kids. About a decade ago I stopped, because life and work took over. The instinct stayed. Watch kids train and you can see straight away what’s structured and what isn’t.

So I went looking for that kind of surf coaching here, and didn’t find much.

What you can buy is a one-on-one lesson for 80 euros. A kid shows up, gets a foam board, catches some whitewater and goes home. There’s nobody else their age in the water, nobody to push them, nobody to watch and think “if she can do it, I can do it.” One kid, one instructor, every time.

I wanted to try the group version, and surfing was the obvious sport for it, mostly because of Lara. She’s six, has been doing weekly lessons with David, and can now stand up and ride on her own. Kitesurfing is hard to share with a six-year-old. In the surf, we can all be in the water at once.

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

Why the boards stay on the sand

The obvious move was to get a pro coach in straight away. That’s backwards. I’ve seen the same thing in every sport I’ve coached: bring in high-level instruction before the kids have the physical base and they can’t do what they’re being taught. They get the technique in theory, and their bodies just won’t produce it. The kids get frustrated, the coach gets frustrated, and nobody improves.

So the plan 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 wreck them. I talked this through with Thomas Barau, another local like David, who’s been very supportive and will probably come in alongside David once the foundation is solid.

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

To anyone walking past, it’s a fitness class on the beach with a bit of surfing tacked on at the end. Good. That’s exactly what it should be at this stage.

The other parents are into it, and a couple of them train alongside the kids. You don’t need a pro coach for squats, pop-ups, paddling drills, and keeping six children moving on sand.

The group

Twice a week. Tamarin Bay. Rain or shine.

Noah, Lara, Taylor, Emy, Teo, and Ali, aged 6 to 9. Small enough that everyone gets attention. Big enough that they push each other, which after December is the whole point: a kid watches another kid nail something and thinks “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 is the same every time, on purpose. Kids do better when they know what’s coming.

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 to whatever Tamarin serves up, which some days is clean waves and some days is twenty minutes of chop. Theola’s opener changes, the drills rotate, the theory moves forward, but in the water it’s always one focus.

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

The tool

I built an interactive session planner for this. Regenerate a session, print it, take it to the beach. What comes out is a single sheet of paper with a plan on it, something a coach can glance at between sets. That’s all it needs to be.

The exercises

And this is the land-based exercise collection behind it: strength, mobility, balance, coordination, cardio. Every drill is tagged, so the planner can pull whatever the day needs.

For now, the kids still measure a session by the fifteen minutes they spend on their boards. I count the pop-ups that came before.