Ladies of the board

Get ready for some more board action at the Huntington Beach Pier.

Mixing sport, lifestyle and family-oriented attractions at the

pier Sept. 2 to 5, the Hello Kitty Boardfest 2005 will offer a

board-sports festival for women of all ages and spectator fun for

just about everybody.

Free attractions and games, surf clinics and skateboarding

demonstrations and contests, as well as live music, will surround a

top-rated professional women’s surfing competition -- the last such

contest of the season on the Assn. of Surfing Professionals World

Qualifying Series.

And during it all, Hello Kitty herself will join with thousands of

girls of all ages for the festivities.

“I had so much fun with this last year, and I’m trying to save up

all my energy for next week’s event,” said top professional surfer

Holly Beck, who helped come up with the idea for the Hello Kitty

Boardfest. “We’re glad to be back in Huntington Beach, and we’re

coming back twice as big this year.”

Four days of nonstop action at the beach will offer all-girl

surfing, exhibitions and clinics, Elle Girl fashion shows, a Paul

Mitchell cut-a-thon, the popular Arrowhead jousting center, performer

Lisa Loeb as a key headliner in live entertainment and, for the first

time, skateboarding clinics and competition.

Beck said that Hello Kitty came to her and her manager 1 1/2

years ago with the desire to get involved somehow with women’s

surfing.

Beck said she worked on a format, and the Boardfest was born.

“I wanted to create something that was in reaction to what was

lacking in women’s surfing,” she said. “We’re taking into account so

many sides of women’s surfing, and we’ve created an atmosphere of

learning and having fun. It brings pros and amateurs alike together.

“The surf contest is one of, if not the only, stand-alone event

where you bring together long and shortboard athletes. In addition to

the skateboarding contests being added to this year’s event, we’re

also adding a professional surfing tag-team event. We ran a tag-team

competition last year for the little girls, and it was the most fun I

had that entire weekend. The laughing and high-fives and cheering

each other on was just so great.”

Each team in the professional tag-team surfing contest will be

composed of three professional shortboarders, one pro longboarder and

an amateur.

Teams will be drawn out of a hat, and the competition will be held

over two days, Beck said.

“What’s fun and unique about this is that on one team, you may

have surfers who are rivals during the course of the contest year,

surfing together on the same team,” Beck said. “We compete so much

throughout the season against each other, so this will be a nice

change of pace.”

The stand-alone women’s surfing competition debuted at the pier

last year, integrating intermediate clinics and an interactive

festival into a world-class competition.

Clinic participants received instruction from and trained

alongside the pros and then had their very own team competition,

using the same venue, contest jerseys, announcers and judges.

The overwhelming positive response to the contest led Boardfest

promoters to include a similar format for this year’s skateboarding

competitions and clinics.

Beck and Siri Cota are two of the top pros headlining the daily

surf clinics and each will have a hands-on role in educating and

instructing clinic participants on how to take surfing to the next

level.

Forty-eight of the top women surfers will battle for $20,000 in

prizes at the four-star World Qualifying Series-rated event.

Surfer Erica Hosseini of Newport Beach competed at last year’s

Hello Kitty Boardfest surfing competition and will be back again for

this year’s contest.

“It was a really fun event,” said the 18-year-old, who graduated

in June from Newport Harbor High and finished fourth overall in the

Pro Junior competition at the U.S. Open of Surfing in July. “It’s a

great opportunity to get all these girls together. I had a great

experience here last year.”

Alexis Von der Lieth, of Malibu, will compete for the first time

at the event.

“I’ve known Holly for a long time and heard that last year’s event

was really great, so I’m looking forward to surfing Huntington,” said

the 23-year-old, who is in her first year on the World Qualifying

Series. “I like surfing Huntington. There’s really good breaks there

and the atmosphere is really fun. It’s the perfect setting for an

event like this.”

* MIKE SCIACCA covers sports and features. He can be reached at

(714) 966-4611 or by e-mail at [email protected].