How Surf Parks Can Build Community and Transform Lives

By Jess Ponting

An Interview with Asa Cascavilla, Waco Surf’s Frothiest Champion

The Surf Park Central team met Asa Cascavilla at Waco Surf during our Dallas Developer’s Tour. He absolutely rips. Asa and Noel Salas from the Surf and Show board review site were just dominating. Asa hung out and brought our team some late night nachos from his run to a restaurant. We heard his story and the impact that Waco Surf has had on his life as a surf-stoked transplant from the big island in Hawaii. His is a story of a surf park positively transforming a landlocked surfer’s life and creating community and kinship around surfing and shared experiences. 

I caught up with Asa as he was driving his Cybertruck from Dallas to Waco for a private surf session with one of his close friends Tom, who he met surfing Waco, and, oddly enough, the members of Metal band Lamb of God. We dug into his journey from the ocean to the surf park and what it has brought to him and the rest of the Waco Surf community. The following is an edited transcript of Asa’s side of our conversation.

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Asa Cascavilla:

I just came back from the Surf Ranch on Monday. And wow! What a Time! I got 15 full waves and poached another, I don’t know, 10 maybe. Something like that. It was super fun. We stayed in the airstreams and the experience was the best surf trip I’ve ever been on. The best wave I’ve ever surfed. I mean just everything about it was top-notch. As good as it gets. The Austin Surf Club took me because they’re building that wave down there. I was there with Peter King, Gerry Lopez, and Nick Woodman, founder of GoPro. Just a bunch of cool cats. It was amazing.

I learned how to be in the ocean at a very young age. I learned how to swim at the YMCA at two years old and ended up like any kid, getting dropped off at the short break at White Sands Beach on the big island in Kona and getting slammed into the sand bodysurfing. Then I got a bodyboard and became pretty good at that. And then I progressed into a real, hard surfboard. I had a single fin, yellow, who knows how old the board was probably from the 70s. My dad bought it for me from Pacific Vibrations surf shop in Kona. 

I would serve a break called Kahulu, the black sand beach on the big island and I met my best friend Zach Smith then and we are still best friends today. We both started surfing together. We grew up surfing together. He lived across the street from the beach while I came up in the mountains. It was a bit harder for me to get down there, so I ended up living with him every chance I could. His dad was a home builder and they had a nice house. A bedroom right next to Zach’s was open for me so I stayed there and we really just pushed each other surfing. We became the groms at Banyans, our local surf spot in Kona where you pretty much trained for the best waves.

I ended up just falling in love with surfing. Completely. It just got a hold of me and it never let go. I started competing locally and started doing really well. A few of us would go to the state championship at Ala Moana Bowls on Oahu and compete there. I never won a state championship, but I got the experience and that was super fun. It’s just something that is carried with you forever. I ended up moving to Santa Barbara after high school and surfed with the UCSB surf team, even though I was going to the city college. Jack Johnson would be out there and I became friends with all those guys because I was a pretty decent surfer.

Surfing just never left me. Fast forward a few years and I moved to Texas. I dropped out of college my freshman year and moved to Texas to work in my dad’s company in the apartment business, real estate. I really only surfed when I’d go on a surf trip someplace. I never made it to the Texas coast to surf until later in life and quickly figured out that was not the quality that I wanted. NLand opened I think it was 2016 and I ended up surfing there a few times. It was okay but it was nothing like the Surf Ranch or Waco. I never really fell in love with NLand, I’d surf it, let’s call it once a month or so. But then when Waco opened, surfing just really grabbed me again.

I became a Waco local. I surf Waco every weekend. I’m actually heading down there right now to surf a private session with one of my really good friends that I made down there, Tom, and the band members from the Lamb of God. 

Even when I would go on surf trips before Waco Surf opened, it was never enough. I never really got my reps in. It’s kind of at the end of the surf trip you start feeling comfortable again, or you can actually link turns and you’re feeling like ‘Okay I can surf again’. It was just never enough, but I went to Nicaragua, Selena Cruz, and other spots in Mexico, Costa Rica multiple times, and then of course Hawaii would be a part of my routine quite often.

The first time I surfed Waco it was like holy smokes! This is what a wave should be like. I heard about it early on. There were leaks of a wave being built down at this guy’s Ranch and so I got in real quick. They were offering a season pass for a thousand bucks. And I bought two. I bought one for me and one for Blair who’s our company pilot. Blair’s not a surfer. He’s from Texas. I asked him, do you want to learn how to surf? He said sure! And I said you gotta fly me down there on the weekends. I’ll pay for all your surfing and we’ll be able to fly down in our jet, it’s a 20 minute flight. That really just opened up a consistency of surfing for me. I mean I surf every single weekend, probably 50 times a year. We fly more often than we drive I’d say and I typically am just a weekend warrior. So Saturday or Sunday, unless somebody invites me to an evening private session like this. Or if my family goes out of town I’ll come out. I’m married to the love of my life. 26 years and we’ve got three beautiful girls and I’m super involved with their lives and my family is everything to me. And so I just love spending time with them and my work is super important as well. We run a pretty large company, we have a lot of employees. We’re in the apartment business and own a ton of real estate and provide homes for people. That’s kind of how I set up my life.

Surfing at Waco Surf often has led to some amazing relationships. I mean Brotherhood relationships. The guy that took me to the Surf Ranch is a surgeon. I met him at the surf park. He just started surfing three years ago, never surfed in his life and now he’s a really good surfer. He’s one of my buddies and I could trust him with anything. We have an incredible relationship and that’s just one of many. I mean, I’ve got guys that I love to travel with, and hang out with my family and their families. There are just so many relationships that have come from this. And at this stage in my life, I’m almost fifty years old, to be able to form those kinds of relationships at this stage in life through surfing, which is my absolute favorite thing to do. It’s just really cool.

They’ve been doing a contest there for a few years and I won one year, then I won it the next year and then this year I got third in our division, the 40 to 50 group. We all are pretty good surfers I’d say. That’s super fun to do. Noel  Salas from ‘Surf and Show’ entered this year and won the over 50 class. I mean, he’s a world-class surfer. A former professional surfer. It’s another one of those relationships stemming from the surf park, he has just been an incredible mentor to me, and not just in the surfing way. He is an older brother to me. I love him. I don’t have any siblings, I’m an only child, and God gifted me a man like this. He loves surfing. He’s a family guy, just a great leader in the surfing community, super positive. Just a wonderful man. He and I have developed a great relationship, he does all the board reviews and he asked me to do the reviews alongside him a while back and we’ve been doing them ever since. He fell in love with Texas and ended up moving from Southern California to Waco. We’ll be surfing on Sunday together. So we get to surf together all the time and it’s an incredible blessing. I go surfing with him and people are all like ‘Wow, you do the Surf and Show with Noel!’ I was at the Surf Ranch and those guys could not stop talking about Surf and Show.

I heard a statistic that less than 1% of the world surfs. That makes sense to me because there are a lot of people in the world and a lot of them live in inland areas, much like me. I believe that surf parks will add so much to communities. I feel like surf parks will be able to take people from unhealthy to healthy. They already are. My buddy JC who took me to the Surf Ranch, wasn’t a surfer he was an ex-pro snowboarder. He quit snowboarding and he really didn’t have a lot of hobbies after that. So surfing just grabbed this guy and turned him into a full-blown Surfer. He’s so into the Surf Ranch. He’s been there two times already and he’s going again this month. He bought a property at the Austin Surf Club that he’s super excited about. I think it’s such an asset to have a surf park in a community. I live in Dallas and we’ve got all these different places to surf. Not just Waco, but you’ve got Fireside Surf which is incredible. I love the guys that decided to take a leap of faith and open that place and I wish them the absolute best. It’s a super great place to get reps in for surfing and to kind of dial your foot control and body movements. We helped them do a bunch of training there which was super fun as well. We trained the staff and tested the wave and I’m grateful for that. 

It’s a beautiful thing to see. Guys in our age bracket, you typically don’t really get better at sports. But because of the reps you can get in a surf park, I see older guys getting better all the time. Constantly. It’s such a blessing. It really is.