It is 6:30 in the evening at Aloha Waffle, and for a good stretch of the interview Emerson Clark has her sights on her Dad’s ice cream waffle sundae. She sneaks a taste, decides it is hers now, and keeps a perfectly straight face the entire time as her Dad playfully groans in disbelief. She talks fast, laughs easily, and is happy to riff on whatever comes up. Then the conversation turns to surfing, and the register changes. The jokes stay, but something underneath them gets very serious, very fast.
When she explains how she got serious about the sport, she does not point to one turning point so much as a feeling that, in her telling, was simply always there.
“Since the beginning, I was kind of like, this is what I want to live for,” she said. “So that definitely makes it serious.”
What turned that instinct into something measurable was USA Surfing. Once she learned about the program she wanted in, and she went after it. Qualifying for its invitational tier — a level she describes plainly as the top of the top — changed the stakes.
“When I qualified, I was like, this is really serious now,” she said.
The results have started to follow. This season she reached the final at a USA Prime stop in the Outer Banks, won her 12–13 Girls division at an O’Neill East Coast Grom Tour event, and placed top five at ESA Eastern Regionals. Ask her what has actually changed in her surfing over the past year, though, and she does not start with a maneuver. She starts with her head.
What Happens in Her Head
“My confidence has definitely progressed a lot,” Clark said. “I just feel like I’m more confident in everything. That’s great for contests. I definitely feel more connected to the ocean and to surfing.”
The shift, as she describes it, came down to one thing: the courage to charge. Committing to bigger waves made her nervous. She went anyway, and the nervousness stopped being the thing in control. From there the confidence compounded, and it started showing up everywhere — in heats, in free surfs, in the way she reads a lineup.
That progression has a technical side too. She has been drilling pocket surfing and higher-intensity sections, working on turns, and grinding through a backside that she names without hesitation as the part she had to fix. One of the habits she is most aware of is a mechanical one she caught in her own surfing — a wide, feet-turned-out stance — and went to work on until she fixed it. But the work she keeps returning to is not mechanical at all.
“A lot of it is mental, because that’s the real thing with surfing — what happens in your mind.”— Emerson Clark
Her theory of who keeps improving and who quietly stalls is unsentimental for someone her age. Two things separate them, she says: being coachable, and putting in the time nobody sees.
“You might see somebody out in the water surfing by you,” she said, “but when they’re at home they can be working out every day, training every day, putting in that extra work.” The visible session, in her telling, is the smaller half of it.
The rest of the work happens mid-heat, where it never shows up in a clip. The maneuvers, she figures, are something most serious surfers can learn; what decides heats once everyone can surf is what is happening behind the eyes.
“When you’re out there, you’re in your head,” she said. “I don’t think people realize that.” There is the self-talk, and there is the awareness of opponents trying to rattle you. Her answer is to release the part she cannot control: whether a set shows up in the final minute of a heat is not in her hands, and staying positive is.
“I just stay in a positive mindset, because the more positive you are, the more positive things can come.”— Emerson Clark
She is honest about how that holds up under pressure. When a heat goes wrong, her first instinct is to blame herself — she should have caught her waves earlier instead of waiting — and then, harder, to accept it.
“I wanted to advance, but at the same time I think, I’m happy that the other person advanced,” she said. “It’s a learning lesson. That’s something that’s very hard to think about.”
Her dad, Andrew Clark, sees it from the other side. “It’s not about the trophies and prizes for her,” he said. “She’s just as happy to see others win as she is to take a win herself.”
Of everything surfing has taught her, the thing she values most is the one that is hardest to drill: learning to control her emotions in the water. She keeps the chaos manageable with humor — asked the funniest thing that happens in a heat, she answers without missing a beat: the Macarena. When an opponent is in her head, she will joke, dance, and laugh with friends in the water rather than let the pressure set the tone.
That discipline gets tested out of the water too. At the time of this interview she was nearly a month into recovery from a non-surf injury, just out of a walking boot with two weeks still to go, watching the training camps roll on without her — “on the sidelines,” as she put it, “like, what am I going to do to catch up with them? It’s been driving me insane.”
Two Coasts, One Edge
Clark credits a lot of her competitive instinct to where she learned to surf, and to the fact that the First Coast rarely hands you anything clean. A surfer here gets the full menu in a single week, and Clark sees that variety as a kind of training the schedule never has to plan.
“You can have really bad waves, really good waves, super windy waves,” she said. “That’s another reason we can adapt.”
Her sharpest point of comparison is the lineup itself, because the water in Puerto Rico reads nothing like the water back home. Clark travels there regularly — it is almost a second home — and the local kids grow up on clean, perfect waves, surfing with an aggression that comes from never having to manufacture anything. The lineup runs hot, because everyone knows the next set is worth going for. Surfing in it pushes her, and she carries that edge back to Florida, where the lineup asks for the opposite.
“Out there, those kids are aggressive because they have perfect waves,” she said. “When it comes back here, it’s like, you have to go get it.”
Back home nothing is handed to you. You wait, you read the bank, and you make a turn or two out of an average wave — a different skill than simply taking your pick of perfect ones. It has also given her a clear-eyed read on the gap between what surfing looks like from the sand and what it actually feels like once you are sitting in the lineup. Ask her what people on the beach get wrong, and she goes straight to the waves themselves. From dry land, every set looks makeable and every call looks obvious. Out in the water, almost none of it is in your hands.
“A lot of people are like, go on this wave, go on this wave. But Mother Nature decides what the wave is, and if you’re going to go.”— Emerson Clark
For all the easy laughs, there is a competitor underneath who does not give ground. Asked her biggest pet peeve in the lineup, she does not hesitate. “When a Dude snakes me,” she said. She is thirteen, regularly sharing peaks with grown men, and she plainly does not see that as a reason to surrender a wave that is hers.
Sponsors, Social Media, and a Clear Head
Clark’s board is starting to carry names, and she is openly stoked about every one of them. She rides for Roxy — her newest, and the one she lights up about most — alongside Blackflys, Revive Chiropractic in Jacksonville Beach, ESA All-Stars, East Coast Surf Development, and Sun Bum. She is genuinely grateful for the support, and quick to point out that it is real help, not just logos: Roxy sends her fresh gear through the year, Sun Bum keeps her stocked so she never gets burned, and the backing is a big part of what lets her travel and compete at all.
What she is careful about is her own head, not her appreciation. She does not want a sponsor list to start standing in for results, and she keeps the whole thing in perspective with a line that is more about humility than indifference.
“A logo on my board is something to live up to, not something I’ve arrived at. I’m thankful for the trust.”— Emerson Clark
That distinction — something to live up to, not something she has arrived at — is the whole point. She is grateful now and hungry for what the partnerships can grow into, and she refuses to let the support do the talking before her surfing does.
She is just as clear-eyed about social media. It can help with sponsors, she allows, but the highlight feeds are edited by design.
“They only post when it’s good,” she said. “They aren’t showing you every time they don’t make it.”
She has felt the pull of it herself — sitting in a heat, chasing a wave she saw online instead of just surfing the one in front of her. The comparison, she has decided, is a distraction from the actual reason she paddles out.
Who She Watches
The surfers Clark looks up to say something about the kind she wants to be — the list leans toward power and composure more than flash. At the top is Carissa Moore, the five-time world champion and the first Olympic gold medalist in women’s surfing, whom she admires for exactly what Moore is known for: “Just her style, and how powerful she is.”
Then Caitlin Simmers, who in 2024 became the youngest women’s world champion in history with a loose, understated style. What Clark keys on is less the trophy than the temperament.
“I love the way she surfs and the way she treats surfing. She’ll go surf her contest, and if she gets knocked out, she’ll be like, man, I had a good surf with my friends.”— Emerson Clark, on Caitlin Simmers
But the influence that lands closest to home is family. Clark also looks up to Lanea Mons, the Atlantic Beach competitor profiled elsewhere in this issue — who happens to be her cousin, and a First Coast surfer a few years ahead of her on the same junior pathway. Right now Clark is working to emulate Lanea’s backside slash, breaking it down and trying to fold it into her own surfing. There is something useful in chasing a specific maneuver from someone in your own family, off your own stretch of coast: it makes the standard concrete, and the path Lanea is already walking — same beach, same junior system, a few years up the road — makes Clark’s own goals feel reachable.
Holding Onto the Fun
For all the talk of mindset and discipline, Clark is still very much a thirteen-year-old, and the humor is part of how she competes, not a break from it. She is the surfer cracking jokes in a tense heat to loosen the moment, and she is just as quick to laugh at herself.
Her life outside the water is busy in a way that is its own kind of personality. She spearfishes and freedives, plays tennis, and babysits — the last one mostly to fund her own surfing, with the money going straight into entry fees and, this summer, a camp in Daytona. She also keeps bees, which shares more with surfing than it first appears: both ask for patience and a careful read of conditions, and neither one rewards forcing it.
She also turns up for the events well beyond her own heats. She is there early to help set up, and she will sometimes climb into the booth to announce heats alongside the co-hosts. I have heard her call a few, and she is sharp.
Underneath all of it, the original reason is intact. Ask her about free surfing and the strategist disappears for a second.
“I love getting out and paddling around and just going on any wave that I can,” she said. “Living my life.”
The best feeling in surfing, for her, is not a result — it is paddling out with people she does not take for granted, with younger kids watching, and getting one good wave on a day she did not expect it.
Andrew sees it in how she treats the younger ones, too. “I love to see how she nurtures the next group of groms coming up behind her, looking up to the one in front of her,” he said.
Eyes Toward What’s Next
The near-term goal is concrete: a final at the NSSA and USA Prime Championships in California this summer. Further out, she is openly torn between chasing the WSL path and the freedom she keeps describing — road trips and surf trips around the world with her best friends.
And when she lets herself picture the biggest stage of all, the Olympics, the first thing she mentions is not a medal but a person. She loves her coach, Austin Clouse, and says that if she ever made the Games, she would want him there in her corner. It is a telling answer from someone who names being coachable as one of the two things that separate the surfers who keep climbing.
Asked to describe her surfing in three words, she lands on powerful, flowy, and fast, then immediately undercuts the verdict the way she undercuts most praise: it’s okay, not great, something to keep improving. What surfing has given her beyond results, she says, is discipline — and a lesson that reaches past the water.
“Mother Nature is in control of everything — not just out in the water, but in life too.”— Emerson Clark
She is young, and most of the climb is still ahead of her. What stands out after a half hour with her is that she keeps pulling every answer back to the water, not the ranking or the feed. For now, she still sounds like a kid who would surf all day whether anyone was filming or not.
