Deep6 has officially named Beth Guirr (@scubaguirr) as the first ambassador in its new Rising Star program, a partnership built to identify and support elite dive instructors before they've built a massive following. The announcement marks the launch of a program Deep6 hopes will change how the industry thinks about sponsorship, and it's one I'm genuinely excited to cover here on Sidemount Authority.

What the Rising Star Program Is

At Deep6, the belief driving this program is simple: the future of this sport belongs to the instructors willing to work for it. Not the ones doing the bare minimum to keep an Open Water card current. The ones spending their own time and money to be 1% better today than they were yesterday, long before anyone's handing them a sponsorship or a stage to stand on.

That belief is exactly why Deep6 built the Rising Star Ambassador program: to find the next generation of elite dive instructors before they have a massive following, and tell them plainly: we see you, and we've got your back.

The scuba industry has no shortage of Open Water Instructors who check the boxes, teach the minimum curriculum, and call it a career. Deep6 isn't interested in that status quo for this program. Yes, those instructors play an important role in our industry but the future of diving is going to be built by instructors who treat their own development like a craft. They spend the time and the money to be 1% better today than they were yesterday, year after year, long before anyone outside their local dive shop knows their name.

Deep6 didn't want to wait until an instructor already had 100,000 followers and a dozen brand deals lined up. By then, everyone's an ambassador. The goal was to find the ones still doing it for the love of the water.

Why Beth Guirr

Beth's path into diving doesn't follow the typical script. She holds a Bachelor of Science degree with a focus in Biology and works as a Registered Massage Therapist out of the Vancouver, BC area, a stable, credentialed career she could have leaned on entirely. Instead, she's spent recent years pouring her time and resources into becoming a better diver and a better instructor, training and traveling through some of the most demanding dive destinations on the planet: Koh Tao in Thailand, the Philippines, Indonesia, and Honduras. Her Instagram bio distills her approach to teaching into three words: control, comfort, confidence. It's clear from her content that she means it.

She also isn't afraid to identify with the weirder, harder corners of the sport. Beth calls herself a "Cave Cryptid," and her feed backs it up: overhead-environment footage, whale shark encounters, and the kind of low-visibility, technical diving that plenty of instructors talk about but never actually pursue. It's the same instinct Deep6 looks for in every Rising Star candidate: an instructor who chases the dives that make them better, not just the ones that make for an easy Instagram post.

That work is starting to get noticed. Beth has already built a verified presence on Instagram and picked up her first equipment partnership with a dive light manufacturer. But she's still early. Still building, still grinding, still very much in the "soon-to-be elite" category this program was built to find.

Why This Matters for Women in Cave and Technical Diving

I want to be direct about something here, because it's a big part of why this announcement matters to me personally, not just as press for a brand I work with.

Technical and cave diving are still spaces where women are underrepresented, especially in instructor roles. Walk into most cave diving courses or board a tech boat and count the women. The numbers haven't caught up to where they should be, and the mentorship path for women looking to move past recreational certifications into overhead environments is still thinner than it needs to be.

That's exactly why naming Beth as Deep6's first Rising Star Ambassador is a big deal, and not just to me. It's not a token gesture or a marketing checkbox. It's real backing, real gear, and a real platform for a woman who is already doing the hard, unglamorous work in cave and soon-to-be technical diving, at the exact point in her career where that kind of support can be the difference between pushing forward into the next level and quietly plateauing or worse yet, burning out.

I've believed for a long time that if we want more women teaching cave and tech diving, we need more women visibly succeeding at it, not just participating in it. Instructors coming up need to see someone who looks like them already doing the dives they're afraid to attempt. Supporting instructors like Beth, publicly and early, is exactly how that shift happens. It's one of the reasons I wanted to cover this announcement myself rather than just link out to it.

What Happens Next

As a Rising Star Ambassador, Beth will be diving in Deep6 gear as she continues developing her technical and cave diving skills, and she'll be partnering with the brand to bring her community along for that journey: the training, the travel, the setbacks, and the milestones alike.

"Being named a Deep6 Rising Star ambassador means so much to me because it feels like recognition not just of where I am in my diving journey, but of where I'm going," Beth said. "I'm incredibly excited to represent a brand that supports exploration, education, and pushing the boundaries of what we're capable of underwater. I'm honored to be part of the Deep6 family and can't wait to see where this journey takes me."

That's the whole idea behind this program. Deep6 isn't chasing influencers. It's chasing instructors, the ones who'd be doing this work with or without a camera pointed at them, because they've decided average was never going to be good enough. Beth is the first name on that list, and I don't think she'll be the last person watching this space to recognize her.

Follow Beth's diving journey on Instagram and Facebook, and keep an eye on Sidemount Authority as Deep6 introduces more Rising Stars.