11-year-old hits waves as competitive flowrider
Lily Beland spent summer hitting the waves
Summer vacation may be over, but an 11-year-old Tyngsboro girl has memories of unending perfect waves to take with her as she returns to school.
Lily Beland is a passionate and competitive flowrider, a sport she discovered when she was 7 and visiting the water park at Jay Peak in Vermont. She saw a teenage girl performing stunts on the resort’s FlowRider structure and Lily was hooked.
“I wanted to be like her,” Lily said.
She was talking about Monica Caffery, now 19, and her coach. Caffery has been a multiyear USA Women’s Professional Champion as well as a two-time Professional Female World Champion.
Flowriding originated in water parks in the 1990s. It has evolved from a summer thrill ride to a serious sport with national and world competitions, as Caffery’s accomplishments show.
Lily said, “This sport is so awesome. People came from all over to participate in Texas.”
Texas was the site of the national championships this year. The sport’s increasing visibility allowed organizers to create a summer tour. Other stops this year are in Utah and North Carolina.
In those two states, Lily placed first in the youth body board and youth stand up surf
ing categories. These wins qualified her to enter the national championships.
In Texas, she repeated her wins and has the gold medals to go with them, in addition to a silver medal for a second-place finish.
However, Lily is uncomfortable talking about her wins. She talks more easily when she talks about the sport and her team at Jay Peak. Her team is called the Flowdogs.
What she loves about it is the way everyone works together.
“We teach each other tricks,” she said.
The participants support one another and cheer for the winners.
Some of the tricks they share come from skateboarding. She remembers a cocky skateboarder who bragged that he could be a flowrider and do his usual tricks without any practice. He learned the hard way that water is tougher to manage than hard pavement.
The FlowRider structure produces “a stationary wave, or sheet wave, that allows riders to surf its continuously flowing face,” according to an online article in SurferToday. Flowriding is considered a subgenre of surfing, although it also borrows from skateboarding.
The structure is equipped with submersible propeller pumps that push a 3-inch sheet of water over a surface, which Lily compares to a trampoline.
Lily’s passion for flowriding has the support of her parents, Stephen and Jennifer Beland, who make the 3K hour drive, one way, to Jay Peak, her ‘ home wave.’ It’s a drive they make “every couple of weeks.” The ride doesn’t seem as long now as they used to. In the summer they also go to the Whales Tale Water Park in Lincoln, N.H.
When she’s not at Jay Peak or Whales Tale practicing her skills, Lily is a student at Notre Dame Academy in Tyngsboro, where she runs track. Her favorite subject is science “because you really get to think about how things fit together.” She’s a wellrounded student and not solely dedicated to STEM subjects. Art is another passion.
“School comes first,” she said. And, her mother added, “She’s a pretty solid student.”