Now Days
What’s it like to be friends on land and bitter rivals the second you hit the water? We head to Kelly Slater’s Surf Ranch to meet five of the world’s best surfers, a generation that has grown up together, now competing for the same titles as each other’s greatest support system and most dangerous obstacles.
By Glorious
Photography by Dominique Powers
Lemoore, California, is not where you expect to find the future of surfing. It sits two hours inland from the coast in the Central Valley, surrounded by agriculture, heat and not much else, and there is no ocean for miles. What there is, at the end of a long flat road, is a rectangular lake and a hydrofoil system that pulls a perfect left-hander into existence every few minutes, again and again, with a level of precision that feels slightly absurd when you remember that surfing is supposed to belong to wind, swell, instinct and luck.
Red Bull invited Glorious to Kelly Slater’s Surf Ranch to spend time with the surfers at the centre of Now Days, a film shot over two years across Mexico, Indonesia, Fiji, Tahiti, South Africa, Hawaii and El Salvador before ending up here. We sent photographer Dominique Powers. She came back with the images in this piece, a new understanding of her own physical limits after trying the wave herself, and a front row look at what happens when the people sharing the water with you are the best on the planet.
Caroline Marks, Caity Simmers, Molly Picklum, Erin Brooks and Sierra Kerr sit around the table. Sky Brown, the sixth member of the group, is not at the Ranch for this part. Sky is seventeen, British Japanese, holds two Olympic bronze medals in park skateboarding for Team GB and is already building a serious career in surfing with LA 2028 in her sights across both sports. Her schedule does what it tends to do when you are competing at that level across two disciplines. She appears throughout the film. The other five are here, and between them they hold world titles, Olympic medals and a backflip that pushed what women can do on a surfboard, all of it accumulated by a group whose average age is barely twenty.
The idea for the project started with Caroline, the twenty three year old world champion and Olympic gold medallist from Florida. She took the film concept to Red Bull because of this group, this moment, and what was already visibly happening between them on tour. She gestures around the table as she says it. “These are all my biggest rivals,” she laughs, “but this is so good for the sport.”
They have spent years in the same places. Same contests, same flights, same hotels, sometimes all in the same room. Six athletes, one bathroom and nowhere to disappear to.
Caity, who grew up in Oceanside and became the youngest world champion in WSL history at eighteen, leans back remembering it. “That’s when the best stuff happens! You’re awkwardly close to each other and you end up learning things about people you never would otherwise. I kind of wish every trip was like that!”
Sierra, from Australia, shrugs. “We’re all just such good friends, laughing and joking with each other all the time.” They sit like that for a while. Talking over each other. Laughing. It drifts.
Then they paddle out.
The tone shifts without anyone needing to point it out. “In the water, you just see red,” Molly says, still smiling. “You just see what you want. It’s Hungry Hungry Hippos out here! We played nice, but now it’s going into the Olympic build up and it’s back to throwing elbows!”
rivalry
The film leans into that shift. The soundtrack is hypnotic, loud in the right places, and the surfing is ridiculous. Even if you don’t know what you’re looking at, it’s hard not to get pulled into it. Sections line up, landings make no sense, and you start questioning your own core strength and how any of this is physically possible.
They watch each other closely. Small things, landings, timing, how a section gets handled. Caroline looks at Erin and calls her “like a gymnast… very acrobatic… spring loaded all the time!” Erin looks at Caity and says she has one of the best styles she has ever seen.
“While making this film, I won a world title, Caity won a world title and Molly won a world title. You want to look back on your career and be like, wow, we really paved a new path for the next generation,” Caroline notes.
The road to that next generation runs through LA 2028, where surfing will be held at Lower Trestles in San Clemente. For this group it is not an abstract target, it is the specific, named coastline they are already building towards.
At the Ranch, the wave gives you the same thing every few minutes and asks what you can do with it. “The wave pool is incredible for repetition,” Caroline says. “You have to surf it perfect for it to feel perfect.”
Erin did not grow up near the ocean, coming from Texas before later moving to Maui, and had to learn all of it deliberately, building the part of surfing that looks instinctive from the outside over time instead. “That was my hardest thing,” she says, referring to reading waves, knowing where to sit, understanding what is coming next. “Ocean knowledge is probably the biggest one.”
She missed some of the filming trips and watched the Mexico footage afterwards, where the waves were heavy enough to throw out a proper spit, the kind of burst of water that can knock you clean off your board. “The clips don’t do it justice,” she says. “I know I’ve surfed those waves! It’s very scary!”
“Mother Nature always has the upper hand. You’re always under the thumb with her!” Molly adds. “You’ll never meet a non humble surfer,”
next-gen
Caity is clear about what keeps her going. Creativity, she says, is not a style choice. “The most powerful thing you can do is be creative in the way you want to surf, not the way you think you’re supposed to. I’m definitely gonna be surfing for the rest of my life. I’ll be an old woman slab surfer who goes to LA to get a new hip but then goes back out wherever I am on Google Maps!”
Sierra, whose approach to surfing has been shaped by growing up around it, with her dad, legendary aerial surfer Josh Kerr, wants competition to feel like something worth watching. “I want to make people excited when I go surf. I don’t want to do the same thing over and over. I want to surprise them and get rewarded for it.”
That idea of progression isn’t abstract for her, it’s how she thinks about every session. She’s not trying to match what’s already there, she’s trying to move it on.
The past year hasn’t been straightforward. She spent much of 2025 dealing with illness, at points unable to stand on a board. When she came back, she didn’t ease into it. She landed a backflip that pushed what feels possible in women’s surfing and reset expectations again.
Sky, in the film, says the thing that ties it together. “We wouldn’t be here without each other. We need each other to push things forward.”
Outside the ropes, the Central Valley stays flat and silent. Inside, the water is a blur of calculated aggression and high speed resets. Whether they are wearing a contest jersey or just taking turns in the glare of the California sun, these five women are operating at a frequency that did not exist a few years ago. They are best of friends on land who are willing to treat each other as the most dangerous opponents in the water once the wave comes. They are the ones showing that the next generation of women’s surfing is not waiting for permission to be the best. It is already there.
The film opens by reciting the labels usually pinned to their generation, the laziness, the indoorsiness, the disconnect, the need to wake up. Watching them here, those words feel like they belong to a different century.
This generation is not waiting for a wake up call. They are the wake up call.
Now Days is available to watch now on Red Bull TV.
Huge thanks to Dominique Powers, follow her here, and see more of her work here.
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