New Zealand snowboarder Cam Melville Ives competes in men’s halfpipe qualifying at The Snow League event in LAAX in March 2026.
The Snow League / Blotto
The Snow League, Shaun White’s professional winter sports league, will hold its first event in New Zealand in September with a new twist on halfpipe competition.
A 16-athlete international field will come together at Cardrona Alpine Resort for the inaugural Snow League World Challenge, a team competition unlike the league’s individual regular season events.
Four international teams—Team North America, Team Europe, Team Asia-Pacific and Team Challengers—will represent four disciplines, with each squad fielding one male and one female snowboarder and one male and one female freeski athlete. The teams will accumulate points throughout the competition, with the highest-scoring team crowned the first World Challenge champion.
It’s an innovative team-based structure in a sport where athletes typically compete on an individual basis. And an athlete-requested rule change to the competition structure will add another twist.
The semifinal rounds will impose a 720-degree spin cap. Athletes can still showcase amplitude, style, grabs, rotations and creativity, but the format puts a deliberate ceiling on degrees of rotation. The finals will open the competition to full progression, with athletes facing off head-to-head.
A new one-hit tiebreaker format will go into effect should a head-to-head go into a third run. The idea was inspired by Yuto Totsuka and Ryusei Yamada’s idea to do one-hit head-to-head battles last season.
“They were exhausted and had done the most runs of everyone and so they decided, ‘If you do one trick, I’ll do one trick.’ That’s so fun and unique,” said freeskier and Olympian Hunter Hess, noting that in any other competition, organizers would not be thrilled if the athletes decided to change the format mid-event. “Snow League is athlete-driven and they focus on the best result for the competitors and the best competition format for the competitors.”
The format is designed to reward the best all-around halfpipe rider, not just the one who can do the most spins.
“It’s just gotten so crazy, to the point where the viewer is having a hard time relating,” says halfpipe snowboarder and Olympian Jake Pates. “It’s nice for the viewer to be able to watch something and not be super confused about what’s happening and why someone got a certain score.
“This is something we’ve been talking about in snowboarding for years and years,” Pates added about the athlete-requested spin cap.
And make no mistake: capping spins at 720 in no way makes for an easier halfpipe run.
After taking four years off from professional snowboarding, Pates had some ground to make up when he returned to competition. The sport had progressed to halfpipe runs featuring multiple triple corks and 1620s where once doubles and 1440s would have been enough for gold. Needless to say, Pates has been focusing on those rotations and inversions in training the last couple years.
“I haven’t even spent time training small stylish tricks under a 720,” Pates said with a laugh. Perhaps counterintuitively, it’s a challenge for the riders to go back to the drawing board and put together runs that will be completely different than what they use in World Cup competition throughout the season. But it’s a welcome one.
“It speaks to the fact that the big, high-difficulty tricks don’t necessarily have to be harder than the small spins like a 720,” Pates said.
Jake Pates competes in run one of the men’s snowboard halfpipe final at the Milan Cortina 2026 Winter Olympics
Getty Images
The format changes other aspects of athletes’ strategies.
“When I compete at other contests, I never watch anyone else’s runs because it’s not me competing against them; it’s me competing against me, to put down the best run I possibly can,” Hess said. “What they do doesn’t matter; it just matters if I show up on the day and do the best run I can.”
And Hess, who competes on the U.S. men’s freeski halfpipe team, knows better than anyone what it takes to beat his competitors. The team is arguably the most dominant among the U.S. freestyle disciplines; though only four members could qualify to represent the United States at the Milan Cortina 2026 Olympics, six Americans were ranked in the top 10 ahead of the Games.
But given Snow League’s head-to-head format—as well as the semifinals spin cap introducing completely new runs from athletes who typically know each other’s top tricks—“you have to be strategic,” Hess said. “You have to watch everyone’s runs, and maybe you can get an advantage dropping after them if they put down a good run. It’s so different; it’ll be fun to see how it goes.”
Freeskier Hunter Hess competes in the men’s finals at The Snow League’s final event in LAAX in March 2026.
The Snow League / Blotto
New Zealand will be particularly well represented at this home-soil event. Team Asia-Pacific includes snowboarder Cam Melville Ives and freeski athlete Luke Harrold, while Team Challengers features freeskiers Mischa Thomas and Fin Melville Ives. They’ll compete alongside established international names including Canadian snowboarder Brooke D’Hondt, Spanish Olympian Queralt Castellet, Estonian freeski star Kelly Sildaru and Korean snowboarder Gaon Choi.
The Challengers team adds another wrinkle. While North America, Europe and Asia-Pacific are geographic groupings, the fourth team is built around emerging talent from multiple regions, giving the next generation a place alongside established World Cup and Olympic-level competitors.
The World Challenge bracket will be influenced by a Teamwork Challenge at Treble Cone in Wānaka on Thursday, September 17. Athletes will work together to create self-shot mountain footage, with the teams presenting their clips at Rippon Vineyard that evening. The winning team will earn a strategic advantage by determining the competition bracket for Saturday.
While competitions have integrated slopestyle competition with all-mountain riding, this may be the first halfpipe competition to include an all-mountain element.
Friday, September 18, will feature a Mini-Pipe Challenge involving White, Snow League athletes and local young skiers and snowboarders. The World Challenge itself runs Saturday morning, followed by an awards ceremony.
“The effort to document and put some focus on the Mini-Pipe or the backcountry filming aspect will be really cool,” Pates said. “It puts an emphasis on us as individuals and as a group, and that should give the viewer a lot more insight into us as people. You see that with F1 and with different sports that have done content that’s more athlete focused. That’s really important for the sport.”
The event, though technically a preseason competition, also marks the beginning of Season Two for The Snow League. The league’s regular season will begin in January 2027 at Buttermilk in Aspen before moving to Park City and eventually LAAX, Switzerland, where the next Snow League World Champions will be crowned.
Be the first to comment