Beau Walters
Community Spotlight | By Jocklyn Mundy
This October, when the United States sends its team to the IWWF World Wakesurf Championships in Hangzhou, China, fourteen American riders will represent the United States of America. Three Windermere residents earned a spot from a town of roughly 3,000 people: Declyn Van Der Riet, Beau Walters and Camden Small.
No other place in America put more names on that list. It is tempting to call that a coincidence. It is not one.
Raised on These Lakes
It takes water, and more hours on it than anyone can count. A place on the U.S. team is not handed out for promise, nor won on talent alone. Talent gets a rider noticed. Repetition, discipline, and the willingness to go back out after a failed run are what turn that talent into results.
Their sport looks effortless from the dock. Behind a single clean trick are hundreds of attempts that ended in the water. The one that lands is the one that makes the feed. Then there is everything the camera never captures: the travel, the qualifying weekends and the long practice sessions—even when the weather turns, or friends are gathering somewhere else. They train with remarkable discipline. But they are still Windermere kids who ride their bikes to Paloma’s for ice cream and love spending Friday nights at the food trucks.
It starts the way it always has here, with a kid and a lake and an afternoon. Where it goes now is Hangzhou.
Anything She Can Ride
Beau Walters is eleven, and she has been wakesurfing for three years. In that time, her major titles and accomplishments include being the reigning WWA Girls Surf National Champion. She has also won the Masters Championship three years running: 2024, 2025, and now 2026. The titles came quickly. So did her appetite for every other kind of board sport, on the water and off it. She foils. She snowboards. She one-wheels. She surfs the ocean whenever she can get to it. It reads less like a résumé than a list of everything she genuinely loves to do.
Off the water, there is a golden retriever named Blue and Taylor Swift on permanent repeat. In a detail that will delight every fifth grader in Windermere, Taylor Swift once liked one of her Instagram reels.
Ask Beau what she is most excited about in China, and the answer expands quickly: the food, the culture, and the chance to meet riders from around the world. Riders who spent their own childhoods on lakes half a world from this one.
It is the kind of answer a results sheet will never give you. The championships are downstream of something much simpler; Beau loves the experience. Beau trains with Orlando Wake Academy and rides for Soulcraft. Follow @beauwakesurfs
“Riding for Team USA means so much to me because I get to represent my country doing something I love. I've worked really hard to get here, and knowing that I'm one of only 14 athletes chosen from across the country is really special. I'm so excited to wear USA on my back, compete with my teammates, and hopefully make everyone back home proud.” — Beau Walters
Declyn Van Der Riet
Two Years
Declyn Van Der Riet has been competing in skim style for two years.
In those two years, the thirteen-year-old has won multiple events on the World Series of Wake Surfing tour, not only in the youth division but in Open Men's Skim, a category that puts him competing against grown men. He is the 2025 WSWS World Champion for Youth Boys. He is the 2025 WWA National Champion for U13.
Skim is the more technical of the sport's two disciplines, closer to skateboarding than to ocean surfing, built on spins, shoves, and a hundred corrections made in a fraction of a second. It punishes hesitation, and it does not care how gifted you are. You learn it the hard way, one wipeout at a time, and there is no path around that part. Two years of that is not a shortcut. It is what happens when unusual talent meets relentless repetition.
Ask him what he is looking forward to in China, and the answer is simple. He is excited to compete internationally and represent Team USA. Declyn rides for Phase 5 and for Shuvit, and online he goes by @decman10.
He Earned It Too
Camden Small is twelve and the reigning national and Masters champion in Boys Under 14 Surf. His results earned him an invitation to Team USA, clear recognition that he belongs among the country's leading young riders.
Camden will not make the trip to China this year, but the selection stands on its own. He earned a place on a fourteen-rider roster representing an entire country. Follow Camden @camden_small.
What Waits at Xiang Lake
The championships run October 9 through 17 at Xiang Lake, in the Xiaoshan District on the edge of Hangzhou City. Riders will arrive from federations worldwide to compete for individual world titles and an overall team title awarded to the strongest national squad. The United States arrives with something to defend. At the inaugural IWWF World Wakesurf Championships in Hong Kong in November 2024, the American team won overall gold. Five U.S. athletes took titles in their divisions.
Wakesurfing made its World Games debut in Chengdu in 2025, another significant step in the sport’s international growth. The riders leaving Windermere this fall are not stepping into an established tradition. They are among the people building one.
What They Take With Them
There is a version of this story in numbers only. Two years and a world title. Three years and back-to-back national championships. Fourteen spots, three of them from one small town on one chain of lakes.
The wave is made now, thrown up behind a boat and shaped to order. The lakes underneath it are the same ones that have raised Windermere children for a hundred years.
This month two young riders will leave Windermere wearing Team USA colors. Their destination is half a world away, but the force that carried them there has always been close to home: the lakes beyond their back doors, and the countless hours they chose to spend on them.
