Ocean City Surf Team Brings the State Title Home

Ocean City reclaims the Joe Keenan NSSA Northeast Regional trophy with 124 points in Harvey Cedars, the school’s 26th title

The Joe Keenan NSSA Northeast Regional Championship trophy is back where Ocean City surfers believe it belongs. On a cold Sunday in Harvey Cedars, the Ocean City High School Surf Team piled up 124 points to win what most local surfers simply call the state title, outlasting longtime rival Manasquan in a contest that wasn’t decided until the final rounds. It is the 26th regional championship in school history and the third for head coach Nathan Garza, who surfed on Ocean City’s title teams from 2000 to 2004 before returning to lead the program five years ago.

Garza even got to share the news with the trophy’s namesake. Waiting for his daughter at swim practice at the Ocean City Community Center this week, he ran into Joe Keenan, who was eager to hear how the contest went. “I told him that the Joe Keenan NSSA NE Regional Trophy was back where it belongs; in OC and in my classroom!” Garza said. “It means everything. Everyone who has surfed for Ocean City understands that.”

The championship was built long before contest day, on an idea Garza preaches all season: in a sport centered on the individual, Ocean City wins and loses as a team. In the NSSA format, every wave a surfer scores feeds the team total, and Garza says his surfers understand that individual success equals team success. With 47 student-athletes on the roster and only the top 12 qualifying for Regionals in Varsity and JV, he asks each of them to define success on their own terms, and then asks all of them to show up no matter what the ocean is doing.

“We practice rain or shine, flat or 2x overhead, and whether it is offshore or 30 knots out of the northeast,” Garza said. “They learn the importance of industriousness; that is, finding joy in the monotonous exercises at practice. That’s how they find themselves on a team: hard work, friendship and finding joy in the times no one else would.”

That work showed most clearly three days before Regionals, when Ocean City finally met the program it has measured itself against for years. Manasquan invited Ocean City to a team-versus-team contest, the first head-to-head meeting between two schools widely considered the best in the state. It turned out to be probably the best day of the last nor’easter swell, with chest- to head-high waves, a mid-tide, a light offshore wind and temperatures around 64 degrees.

Garza admits he went in nervous, but the feeling didn’t survive the first heat. “It was the best surfing I have seen from a high school team. Period,” he said. “Every girl and guy, shortboard and longboard on the team got some of the best waves all season. That’s when I knew for sure that it was our state title to lose.”

Several surfers peaked at exactly the right moment. Garza joked that singling out individuals on a 47-member team would take an entire thesis paper, but a few names stand out. For four years, senior Grady Hoffman, nicknamed Grady-Grom as a freshman, has been the heart and soul of the team. Garza says he is still “perpetually stoked and eager to improve.” When the pressure is highest, Ocean City leans on Cruz Dinofa and Finn Law, whom Garza calls absolute technicians who lock in the moment the jerseys go on.

Three others broke out late in the season. Luke Chickadel always had the talent, but Garza said he still needed to find the urgency champions need. Something clicked about two weeks before Regionals. His first heat against Manasquan was the best Garza had seen him surf in four years (“I was literally speechless”), and he carried that intensity to LBI, where he took first overall in JV. Carter Doorley began stringing together strong backhand waves as the storm swell built, then stood out against Manasquan. And James Carr, already a three-time NSSA Northeast longboard champion and three-time Belmar Pro longboard champion, shook off an early-season struggle switching between longboard and shortboard. In the late-October swell, Garza watched him link a backside snap that blew the fins out the back into a powerful on-rail carve down the face, a combination that reminded the coach of Pete Mendia.

By the day of regionals, Ocean City was ready for whatever the ocean offered, and in Harvey Cedars it offered a little of everything. “Sunday morning in Harvey Cedars was COLD,” Garza said. “We all joked that we had ALL of the weather that day.” The surf itself was good, 3 to 4 feet with an occasional bigger set and light, variable winds, but an early high tide sent the waves running fast into deep spots between the sandbars, and the sets came slowly.

With most surfers getting only three to five waves in a 15-minute heat, Garza’s plan was to grab a scoring wave early and not be too picky. On a wave that fast, that meant either landing a top-to-bottom maneuver right away or racing down the line to link two or three top turns. The approach worked: Ocean City surfers won or placed second in those first few rounds.

The girls set the tone, and few heats meant more than one surfed by a freshman. When the heat draws were posted Saturday afternoon, Molly O’Brien messaged her coach, worried about facing two of the best girls in the state, Keira Soleau and Gemma Knowles, who would go on to finish first and third overall. Garza told her to shift her focus to what she could control and trust her training. She did. O’Brien advanced out of that heat, giving the team another scoring opportunity, and her run ended in the quarterfinals by just .04 of a point. “That was a huge push and motivator for everyone,” Garza said.

By around 3 p.m., the girls had delivered every score the team needed from them. An updated ranking, posted during Carr’s longboard semifinal, had Ocean City ahead of Manasquan 77-72, with five Ocean City scoring surfers still alive to Manasquan’s four. That left it to Dinofa, Law, Jude McAfee and Carr to reach the finals and protect the lead. They did, and three of the four surfers in the final wore Ocean City jerseys. When McAfee beat Gavin Mitchell, whom Garza called “top five in the state hands down,” the coach knew the title was theirs. Still, he insists no one surfer won it. “In the NSSA team format, it really isn’t possible for one surfer to win it for everyone,” he said. “It is a true team event.”

Even so, Garza couldn’t let himself relax until it was official. The confirmation came by accident, when announcer Randy, reading the JV individual and team awards, mistakenly read out the varsity overall results instead. “He literally said, ‘Oh, whoops, that was varsity… Ocean City won it, 124 points,'” Garza recalled. The team erupted, and Garza found himself in a mosh pit of Ocean City surfers, fighting his way to the front to grab the trophy. That night, Ocean City firefighters, among them Brian Warley and Matt Slaughter, Garza’s teammates on the 2000-2004 title teams, escorted the champions back into town.

For Garza, the win carries the weight of a long tradition. Under longtime coach Mark Miedema, Ocean City won 23 regional titles, and Garza entered high school at the height of that run, when it felt like a foregone conclusion that OC would win. When he came back as a coach, things had changed, something he admits was difficult to accept. Since taking over, his mission has been to build “a REAL sports program” with structure and expectations grounded in championship culture, confident that the hardware would follow.

He is quick to share the credit, starting with the rival up the coast. Manasquan is a great, well-coached team, Garza said, and Ocean City trains every day with them in mind. “In a very real way, we owe them a debt of gratitude for forcing us to be the best version of ourselves,” he said, echoing a former Manasquan coach who once described the rivalry as iron sharpening iron. Closer to home, the island’s alumni and local legends see the surfers almost daily, coaching them up and reminding them of the bar Ocean City has set. “I am indebted to them and this community for all their support,” Garza said.

The season asks a lot of Garza and his family. His wife coaches Ocean City’s highly successful girls volleyball team, so during the fall they get about an hour together in the morning and a couple more at night. What makes it worthwhile, he said, is watching his surfers grow into young adults, and the compliment he may value most arrived by email from a coach up north, who praised the team for carrying itself with maturity and respect. “That sentiment might mean more to me than the trophy,” Garza said. “Might.”

“In the end, I cannot express how proud I am of these amazing kids,” he added. “Super stoked it is back at OCHS where it belongs.”