Part One
The Diva Cup Community
Helplessly trying to untangle the hooks locking her in the impact zone, then middle schooler Sierra Emrick realized she was stuck and needed immediate help. At a Pismo Pier surf contest, Emrick got her bun mangled in a mess of gear from nearby fishermen.
She locked eyes with a woman she didn’t know well but recognized from other competitions. In full “mom mode,” the woman came to Emrick’s rescue and tore the line out of her hair — crisis averted.
The woman’s name was Kyra Joseph. She shared a sentiment Emrick aligned with — a deep passion for connecting surfing with community.
This moment of femininity in the water was not only a rescue effort. Emrick has always been driven by finding community in the water. From the moment Emrick and Joseph locked eyes, it was a metaphorical statement that community over competition is essential to women’s empowerment in the water.
Joseph began paddling out as a kid with her mom in Morro Bay, though their feminine presence was nothing compared to what they witnessed as a sea full of men.
Years later, Joseph returned home to the Central Coast to find that the surfing community was now full of women riding waves. She was hit with a wave of inspiration and decided to pioneer an all-women surfing competition on the Central Coast, called Diva Cup, which recently had its third annual competition in Cayucos on Nov. 22, 2025.
Little did Joseph know that saving Emrick at the Pismo surf contest would go on to set the foundation for the Diva Cup community.
All her life, Emrick was drawn to connecting with and protecting the natural world. Participating in Junior Guards, a California lifeguard training program, in Morro Bay and Cayucos made her proficient in her water skills and drew her closer to the surfing community.
At 13 years old, Emrick entered her first Roxy surfing contest in San Diego. After facing immediate elimination, her dad discreetly re-entered her under a different name.
“I actually advanced one heat, and I was so stoked. I think I did my first cross-tip cross-up ever, and I was just like frothing so hard,” Emrick said. “I got this Roxy goodie bag. Like all the Roxy legends were there, and I remember driving home from that trip with my dad, and just looking out the window and being like, ‘I’m a surfer.’”
Years after her first surf competition, Emrick committed to studying marine biology at UCSB as a D-1 track and field athlete. Despite juggling her studies and being a competitive student athlete, surfing remained her outlet and cultivated a sense of community for her.
After graduation, Emrick worked in Panama and Sri Lanka, finding a global phenomenon of women’s surf empowerment programs and how they empowered the local youth to avoid harmful paths, such as drug use.
Upon returning to the Central Coast, Emrick noticed that the surfing conditions were more challenging, and it wasn’t just for environmental reasons. The water was dominated by hypercompetitive masculinity.
“It just wasn’t this space of like nurturing community that I [had] always wanted,” Emrick said. “That’s why I came to the ocean was to feel good and to be embraced in whatever state I was coming to it in. Whether I was like wanting to cry, wanting to scream, wanting to express joy; it’s just like every wave is an open slate for expression.”
The feminine energy was more playful and rooted in experience rather than being the best, yet Emrick witnessed a masculine focus on shredding the wave apart.
“You can really see the patriarchy just like pushing itself into surfing,” Emrick said. “If it’s a group of girls, you’re more likely to like be hooting and all of a sudden everyone just builds on each other and it’s this like playful and loving and supportive environment as opposed to like the cold, competitive, very powerful masculine surfing.”
Just when Emrick felt she needed to do something in support of broadening this femme surfing culture, whispers about Diva Cup made their way through the coastline. Emrick reached out to Joseph, who had saved her in the water over a decade before and together, the two of them co-founded the event.
Joseph serves as the Executive Director, overseeing current operations, while Emrick is the Board President of the Femme Futures Foundation, responsible for managing the nonprofit and its goal with the Diva Cup competition: promoting feminine empowerment in the water.
Part Two
The Microcosm
Women’s empowerment in the water also inspired two Cal Poly professors to explore feminine surf culture under a different lens.
Dr. Lydia Heberling is co-editor of the book “Waves of Belonging: Indigeneity, Race, and Gender in the Surfing Lineup,” with Dr. Elizabeth Sine as a contributor. The book explores the relationships between gender and surfing, surfing as an Indigenous practice, and more.
The birth of Western feminine surf culture came into fruition in the 1990s, according to the authors. World surf champion Lisa Andersen was partnering with Roxy, and films like “Blue Crush” contributed to a burning “girl-power” aesthetic. The era made the sport previously dominated by men available to a femme presence.
This new subculture of surfing seemed to celebrate women’s progress; but from a narrow perspective. This narrow, white-centered lens defining women’s surfing empowered those who could relate and limited those who didn’t feel they belonged in such a specific subculture, the authors said.
“I think a lot of spaces like the Diva Cup always have to navigate this really careful path between inclusivity and kind of capitalizing on the aesthetics and kind of the cultural vibes of surfing culture,” Heberling said. “So it does actually, without a lot of careful intention, kind of create an aura of exclusivity if you don’t pertain a certain way, if you don’t vibe with the way that surf culture does things.”
Sine said it can be tempting to frame surfing as a universally uplifting and liberating space without acknowledging some of the trauma that can come along with it. Lineup politics, the competitive nature of the sport, or how people identify or are perceived within the lineup are examples of conflicting experiences in the water, she said.
“I mentioned surfing being this place of kind of like processing embodied baggage of life,” Sine said. “It’s also been, to speak from a personal space, a site of trauma. And I know I’m not the only person who experiences it that way as well.”
The “cool vibes” of surfing culture can be painted as a force of universal connection, though that doesn’t always leave space for everyone, according to Sine.
Surfing can make people feel left out for many reasons, including their race, sexuality and other identities, Sine said. What often gets overlooked is the range of experiences people can have with external gazes and the pressure and power of the surfing space, Sine said.
The answer to creating a more inclusive surfing culture altogether isn’t simple and requires moving the picture frame wider, according to Heberling.
“Surfing culture is a kind of microcosm of our broader society,” Heberling said. “As long as we kind of value or continue to perpetuate ideas around patriarchy, white supremacy, like some of these bigger ideas, we’re going to think about who belongs and what spaces kind of along those logics.”
It’s about dismantling these broader systemic limitations because all of those broader cultural values and beliefs come out in the water implicitly or explicitly, according to Heberling.
“It’s going to take continued conversations,” Heberling said. “It’s going to take more education. It’s going to take more representation, like more people willing to paddle out into these spaces to normalize other forms of being embodied in a surfing lineup.”
The burden of change ultimately falls on underrepresented or misrepresented groups, such as women, people of color or Indigenous people, according to Heberling.
“We just have to keep talking about belonging and talking about creating community in the space,” Heberling said.
Part Three
Paddling into Existence
The Diva Cup event “celebrates feminine strength and is built on a foundation of radical self-expression,” according to the website.
To this day, surfers are revamping the space for femininity, constantly questioning the scope of who is being included, and how to honor everyone who wants to be involved.
“Holding space for the fact that surfing can be a great, fun, wonderful thing in a whole bunch of ways,” Sine said. “It’s also a complicated place that’s wrought with contradiction.”
The Diva Cup Surf Competition is reimagining competition as an opportunity to cultivate community. “You can’t look at surf culture in a vacuum when it comes to belonging,” Heberling said. “You have to really think more holistically about how our culture approaches things.”
Diversity is a top value among the event organizers. They are actively trying to cultivate a diverse board of people with different opinions, identities and backgrounds, according to Emrick. “It’s like my church,” Emrick said. “It’s such a place of healing and you can show up as you are to the ocean, and it’s always going to hold you, and it’s going to humble you, too.”