Nike's Chosen contest is in full swing, and hundreds of crews have registered. Check the frontrunners and you'll see that, yeah, there's some heavy ripping -- but let's revisit the criteria for getting Noticed: creativity, camaraderie, progression (CCP). It's more about personality than performance, and crews should be going all out to amplify the Cs in CCP, showing what makes them radder than the kids down the street.

With that in mind, here are a few token surf crews we'd like to see in Chosen -- ones that could really make a splash and snatch the spotlight. If one of these describes you and your friends, log off and grab a camera already. Time's a wasting.

House Crews
So much interesting stuff goes down when your crew is together under a single roof -- all you have to do is capture it. If you're roommates, siblings, or just tend to hang at one pad all the time, use that to tell your story. Gaps in the action and downtime between surf sessions are crew video glue. For inspiration, see Football Shmootball (about the Volcom house), Shelter (friends chilling and surfing in a rented farmhouse), or any of the early-'90s Lost videos. Or just watch Animal House.

Lake Crews
Great Lakes surfers are a strange, tweaked community that puts common conceptions of "hardcore" in a tutu. Their surfing experience is unique and completely different from coastal softies. Seems like there'd be a crew somewhere out in Michigan just waiting to get Noticed. And you know they've got the time on their hands.

Rich Crews
Kids born with a silver spoon in their beak and a few fresh Merricks in their Range Rover are a blessed breed. If your crew has trustafarian dough to throw around, surfing fine waves and living it up like MTV reality stars, at least film the fun. Money isn't everything, but it might make some pretty sweet Chosen videos.
Sterling Spencer and Warren Smith -- a tight Gulf Coast crew of two. Really tight.

Gulf Crews
Everything about the Gulf -- that it's part of the South, that it's recovering from a disaster, that its pervasive flatness means surfers have to be creative every day of the year to stay sane -- makes it fertile soil for a rad crew to spring from. Cory Lopez proved that surf legends can come out of the Gulf, and Sterling Spencer is proving that they can be interesting to boot. A Gulf Coast crew could kill it.


Nike's all-girl surf crew at the premiere of their film Leave a Message.

All-Girl Crews
Predictably -- surfing still skews heavily male -- Chosen is so far predominately a boys' club. But all that means is that a crew of motivated girls with a camera would stand out like sunflowers in a field of grass. Nike's own surf team just paved the way with its new all-girl surf film Leave a Message, and there's never in history been more talent on the fairer side of the gender gap. A female crew is an obvious opportunity for chicks who rip.

Retro Crews
Check the short trunks, check the fishes and single-fins, check the Ray-Bans and greaser hair: surfing, like the rest of the hipster universe, is revisiting the past in style. Retro, vintage, throwback -- whatever you want to call it, it's all the rage and then some. No doubt the moneyed hills and seaside burgs of Laguna Beach or North County San Diego are home to some fab-chic retro crews, high-lining on keel-fin boards in beavertail wetsuits by day and shooting film cameras at a jazz show by night.


One of the two infamous Volcom houses at Pipeline, home to a crew almost as famous as the wave out front.

North Shore Crews
Throw a rock on The Rock and it'll hit a crew of underground heroes who surf the North Shore better than most of the "pros" paid to fly there every November. It's a quirky little Petri dish of a place year-round, both when the surf world descends in winter and when it's quiet and sleepy after the crowds leave. Part country living, part mega-industry fire pit. Cruising and charging in equal measures. There's more than one crew story waiting to be told from the Seven Mile Miracle.

This list is by no means exhaustive -- in fact, what it's missing is the crew we'd like to see most of all: yours. Connect through Nike's Facebook page to get your crew in the game.