Sage Erickson spent five years of battling on the Championship Tour before she notched her first Championship Tour victory in 2017 at the Vans US Open of Surfing. That year she cracked the Top 10 on the Jeep Leaderboard for the second-straight season.

Erickson was born in Ojai, California, where she was raised in her mom’s coffee shop. The chilly waters of nearby Ventura didn’t interest her early on, but her parents moved Hawaii when she was nine, and she nabbed an old beater board at Sunset Beach one day, paddled out to the point, rode a wave to the sand, and was hooked immediately.

Coco Ho became her best friend at school. She spent five years falling in love with the sport before she moved back to California with her mom and made the legendary points of Santa Barbara her new favorite stomping ground. It was the perfect place for her to streamline her dynamic technique. After a solid amateur and pro junior career, she joined the Championship Tour in 2012, where solid ground was much tougher to find.

She struggled during her early years on tour, and even fell off in 2014, but clawed her way back the very next year. In 2015 she got her butt kicked again on the CT, but dominated the Qualifying Series, where her confidence steadily grew. The rub on Sage was she lacked the killer instinct. Her coffee-shop days turned her into too sweet of a soul for Tour life. But she found her game face in 2016, nabbing a third at Trestles and a handful of quarterfinal finishes which led to her first Top 10 finish.

Her confidence peaked after doing it again in 2017, and nabbing that long-awaited win, however that success was short-lived. 2018 was her worst year on Tour, and she failed to qualify either through the CT or QS. Many questioned whether Erickson may concentrate on her other interests in fashion and free surfing, but that would be to underestimate the inner competitive steel behind the ever-present smile.

In 2019 she won two QS events and stormed her way on to the CT for 2020. Sage was back and the surfing world was a better place for it.