Canada’s Erin Brooks has been named the 2025 Rookie of the Year for the World Surf League Championship Tour.
The only women’s rookie to make the mid-season cut, Brooks finished her debut season ranked eighth in the world.
The 18-year-old is the first Canadian to qualify for the tour, Brooks debuted with high expectations, elevated by a victory in her first-ever World Surf League appearance as a wild card in the final event of the 2024 season in Fiji.
Brooks rose to the top of the strong rookie pack and kept herself in contention for the Final 5 right up until the final qualifying event in Tahiti.
Her three semifinal appearances this season all came at notoriously difficult-to-read, shifting sand-bottom breaks, including Supertubos, Portugal, Burleigh Heads, Australia, and Saquarema, Brazil.
The standout moment of Brooks’s season was the quarterfinals of the Bonsoy Gold Coast Pro, where her hyper-critical backhand earned the second-highest heat total of the women’s season, 17.76 (out of a possible 20), to defeat eight-time world champion Stephanie Gilmore of Australia.
Brooks was born in Texas and grew up in Hawaii but has Canadian ties through her American-born father Jeff, who is a dual American-Canadian citizen, and her grandfather who was born and raised in Montreal.
Brooks’s citizenship bid was initially turned down but Immigration Minister Marc Miller had a change of heart in January 2024 after a ruling by Ontario’s Superior Court of Justice that it is unconstitutional for Canada to deny automatic citizenship to the children of foreign-born Canadians who grew up abroad.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Aug. 13, 2025.
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