Cori Schumacher

Cori Schumacher

Cori Schumacher is an international, professional surfer from Cardiff, California.

Schumacher was born April 23, 1977 in Huntington Beach, California, to Craig Allen Schumacher and Jeannette Lorrainne Michaud (AKA Jeannette Prince). Both her parents were avid surfers. Her mother surfed pregnant with her until she was a month due. Cori has one sister, Chelsea Marie Schumacher, born in 1978.

The family picked up and moved from Huntington Beach to San Diego when Schumacher was 3 years old. They made Ocean Beach their home for several years. When Schumacher was 5 years old, her parents purchased a blue and yellow softboard for her. They took her down to Dog Beach in Ocean Beach where she rode her first waves.

Donald Takayama met Schumacher when she was around the age of 8. He gave her the first board he shaped for Joel Tudor and has shaped boards for her ever since. Takayama and Schumacher do not have a sponsorship relationship, rather, their relationship is based around the traditional Hawaiian conception of hanai. Schumacher refuses sponsorship in general, intentionally bucking a trend entrenched in her sport in order to have the freedom to speak her mind on issues considered anathema to speak out about in surfing. She has written various articles addressing these issues that have been published in The Inertia and The Guardian.

Schumacher has had a varied competitive career that began when she was 8 years old. Since then, she has won multiple national and international amateur shortboarding titles. She surfed as the #1 US female shortboarder on the 1994 and 1996 US Team for the ISA Jr. Championships. Her most notable international shortboard title was winner of the 1995 Pan-American Championships. But Schumacher is best known for her efforts in women’s longboarding. She is a three-time Women’s World Longboard Champion (2000, 2001, 2010), Women’s Longboard Pipeline Pro Champion (2009) and two-time ASP North American Champion (2008, 2009). From late 2001 to 2008, Schumacher went on sabbatical from competition. She returned in 2008 to win the Linda Benson Roxy Jam at Cardiff, California.

In 2005, when Linda Benson took over the Women’s World Longboard Championships from Hank Raymond (who ran the championships from 1999-2004), Schumacher participated with a small group of advisors that supported Benson as she organized the 2005 Women’s World Longboard Championships at Ocean Beach.

Schumacher can be found in such films as: The Road, Multiple Personalities, Sol Sirens and Ten Year’s of Women’s Longboarding.

Schumacher supports organizations such as the Rell Sunn Education Fund, Women For Women International and Surf For Life, a non-profit organization that seeks to connect surfers and non-surfers alike with community service activities that will affect change at an international level. She is also an advocate for various issues including gender disparity, heterosexism and homophobia in sport.

Most recently, Schumacher made headlines by choosing to boycott the 2011 ASP Women's World Longboarding Tour, because she takes issue with holding an event in Hainan Island, China.

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