Dropping in with less than two weeks to go in the Nike Chosen contest, the Get Rad crew from Santa Cruz, CA wants to end it with a bang. They shimmied into the mix and quickly racked up hundreds of views and Likes, more by the minute, and are sure to push their campaign until closing time on July 30th. Get Rad is a crew you can stand behind — good surfers, great humans — as we learned in talking to crew member Kyle Thiermann. Here’s what he spilled.

What’s the word, Kyle?

Kyle Thiermann (Get Rad crew): Just been on Facebook. For the last few days I’ve spent more time on Facebook than in my entire life, telling all my friends to check out the movie.

How’d you hear about the contest, or what made you want to rally a crew?

I heard about it through [fellow crew member] Kyle Buthman. We’re pretty much best friends, and we both cruise around and surf and make movies together. That’s definitely an original thing about our crew: we’re all the surfers and the filmmakers. We didn’t hire a filmmaker to do this, we make it all ourselves.

Who’s in your crew, and how did it come together?

There’s me, 21, Kyle Buthman is 23, Austin Smith-Ford is 23, and Matt Meyers is 24.

We chose our crew based on the fact that we’re all best friends and we surf together every day. Born and raised [in Santa Cruz]. We’ve been pretty much best friends since we were like 11 years old.

What’s each guy into, outside of surfing? What do you do with yourselves?

One thing that I think is definitely unique about us is how we’re all doing such completely different things with our lives, and I think it’s cool that forums like the Nike Chosen contest, they allow for people to show their personality and get themselves out there, even if they’re not the people who are on the ‘CT.

Kyle, he’s a filmer for Quiksilver — he just took off to Puerto today to film the [Quiksilver Pro] for them.

I’m doing the Surfing For Change series, which is based on environmental and social activism, where I go on a surf trip and then cover an environmental issue happening there.

Austin Smith-Ford and Matt Myers are both doing their thing as well. Austin, aside from what we mentioned about him in the video, he’s a pretty dynamic person. He participates in this youth program called The Core, where it’s getting the youth of Santa Cruz into healthy activities. So like every Wednesday night they go and have dodgeball tournaments, or they have surf classes where Austin will go teach the kids how to surf — just healthy activities. Him and Matt Myers are pretty much heading up The Core this year, which is pretty cool.

Then Matt is also a Junior Guard in the summer. I know we all talked about him kind of being the partier of the crew, which he is, but at the same time he’s involved so much in helping kids out.

What are your plans for the next two weeks to try to get Chosen?

We actually just printed shirts, so we’ve got T-shirts coming out around town. You can see on our profile, the Get Rad shirts. Then I just talked to the Santa Cruz Sentinel and they’re doing an article about it. The thing is that we entered kind of late in the game, so we’re coming from behind, but we’re getting a huge amount of support and we’re climbing the ranks pretty fast. The next step is for Nike to Notice us, because once they Notice a crew it blasts it out to a much wider audience. But I just sent a message out to my Surfing For Change email list — definitely using all the social media techniques I’ve used for my activism movies for this contest as well.