2025 Super Girl Surf Pro Update

They talk about the cape. Red. The symbol. But it's in the in-between — the heats where you get beaten up on big closeouts, fighting for priority, praying for that inside section — where reputations get made. That's where Rachell Aguero tried making hers at the 2025 Super Girl Surf Pro, an international WSL QS 4,000 event held in Oceanside.

First of all: how far? The 2025 WSL record for the Super Girl reveals Aguero made it through the early rounds but not the quarters. Her name vanishes from the later brackets of the event, so it looks as if she went out before the Round of 16 (or maybe the Round of 32). Exact heat and opposition aren't highlighted on the event-result pages of WSL but absence on the advanced results is a tricky lead.

And how many girls surfed — the Super Girl Pro isn't some small-batch surf comp. It's never referred to as "the world's largest female surfing event," and in 2025 it saw 175+ top female surf professionals competing for the highly prized red cape.

It involves regional QS players, local legends, and potential international threats. In short, you're not only surfing heats — you're competing through gauntlets.

So why even enter? Why brave the lineup, the pressure, the judges and fickle sea? Because for these girls, Super Girl isn’t just a showpiece — it’s a ladder. It’s one of the few WSL QS 4,000 events in the U.S., and when you place, you bank ranking points that inch you toward the WSL Championship Tour.

It's also an enormous stage — media, sponsors, festival overlap, beyond surf mag pages. For the surfer as Aguero, involvement here becomes credibility, momentum, the capacity to be in the radar of the insiders.

And who was the winner of the game? In 2025, the cape was captured by Leilani McGonagle after dominating heat after heat by beating Alyssa Spencer in the final.

Two-time Super Girl champion Spencer had a gallant attempt but was unable to go the distance in that final exchange. McGonagle wins in historic fashion — as the first international competitor of all time to claim the Super Girl title. Let's put it into perspective: the cape doesn't just indicate success at the single heat — it's an indicator of qualification into the elite division of women's QS and the first step on the ladder on the road towards qualification for the world tour. For all the girls who paddled out there — Rachell Aguero included — the same question haunts the back of the mind: the next heat, the next point, the next wave that takes you further? In the retelling of contests, names like McGonagle and Spencer will headline. But for Aguero, the push to surf this field — against 175+ elite peers — is itself a stake in the claim: I belong here. The margins in this contest are thin — one wave call, one priority interruption, one flinch — and Aguero, even in elimination, got measured by that standard. She might not have made it to quarters this time, but she paddled into the arena. That says something.