East Coast Surfing Championships - Press Office - ECSC, the premier surfing contest and Pro-Am Surfing competition on the East Coast is the Southeast's best beach and entertainment festival located in Virginia Beach, Virginia. The surfing competition and beach events also includes other water sports: skimboarding, volleyball, a boardwalk 5K run, Hooters swimsuit contest, street skateboard and ramp contests, and live bands and music on the beach.

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Maggie Douglas / Public Relations Chairman
email: publicrelations@surfecsc.com / phone: 757-557-6140
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****FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: August 2003 ****

VIRGINIA BEACH, Va. -- The 41st Annual East Coast Surfing Championships will be held August 20-24, 2003 at the Virginia Beach Oceanfront.

The ECSC is North America’s oldest surfing contest and the second oldest continuously-run surfing contest in the world. About 100 professional surfers from around the world will compete for a cash purse. The Junior Men’s purse will be $15,000, the largest in North America and the World! There will also be hundreds of amateur surfers competing for top ranking on the amateur circuit.

But ECSC has evolved over its forty-one years as more than just a surfing event. Dozens of people also take part in other competitions including skimboarding, volleyball and an oceanfront 8K and 1-mile Fun Run. Skateboarding will also be featured at this year’s ECSC. Additionally, live regional and national musical acts will perform on the beachfront stage located between 4th and 5th streets. The festival and all events are open to the public, free of charge; however the competitions do require an entry fee.

The East Coast Surfing Championships is produced solely by the Virginia Beach Jaycees, an all volunteer organization. A portion of the proceeds raised at the event benefit the Jaycees’ many charitable projects.

The East Coast Surfing Championships originated from a party held in the Summer of 1961 in the town of Gilgo Beach, New York. The party was a small affair thrown by some wealthy parents for their teenagers who surfed.

Surfing was then still a novelty or curiosity to most of the East Coast population. As more people began getting surfboards, (and because the party in 1961 was a lot of fun), plans for the 1962 party were becoming bigger.

The second party, now billed as the East Coast Surfing Championships, was publicized only by word-of-mouth and was held in Gilgo Beach on September 7, 1962. Bob Holland, Pete Smith and Butch Maloney were among those from the Virginia Beach community who attended the event.

By the third year, 1963, the reputation of the party had now reached surfing fans up and down the coast. Virginia Beach, then an early hotbed of surfing activity, was represented again, presumably by Bob Holland, Pete Smith and others. Just a few weeks earlier on August 24, 1963, in Virginia Beach, the first Virginia Beach Surfing Carnival was held by the Virginia Beach Junior Chamber of Commerce in cooperation with the Virginia Beach Surfing Club and local surfboard dealers like Western Auto, Fuel/Feed & Building Supplies and Coaches Sporting Goods.

At the 1963 ECSC in Gilgo Beach, the case was made by the Virginia Beach crowd to move the event to Virginia Beach because it was a more central location and easier to get to for all East Coast surfers (from Maine to Florida). Virginia Beach was already well-known among the surfing networks of the East and therefore stood a better chance to truly become an annual contest.

In 1964, it appears that the "2nd annual Virginia Beach Surfing Carnival" and a Long Island surfing event of some sort were BOTH held, the Virginia Beach event on August 29 -30 and the Gilgo Beach party later in September. The overlap is made murky because the 1964 contest in Virginia Beach is headlined as the East Coast Championships.

By 1965, the confusion had cleared up. The New York event was transformed into another contest while most participants were now heading to Virginia Beach because the weather was nicer and the waves were bigger and more consistent. The name of the Virginia Beach Surfing Carnival was dropped in favor of the plain and simple East Coast Surfing Championships.

For purposes of record-keeping and clarity, the thirty years of ECSC are defined from the first Jaycee-sponsored surfing event in August 1963 through today. The 1963 event was chaired by Don Fentress and Phil McAdam and it later incorporated the unorganized Gilgo Beach contest and adopted its name. All this makes ECSC the second-longest, continuously-run surfing competition in the world.

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