As I sat in David Alden's office (the General Manager of Soldier Mountain, ID) I asked him a question I’ve been asking everyone I could for the past week.
What did you think of The Snow League’s debut?
“I was pretty impressed,” he said. “I am getting concerned that the halfpipe is going to become aerials, though. You remember aerials from back in the day?”
I don’t remember aerials from back in the day, but I know what he means. It’s a fear that has rang through the snowboarding community for years now. Three words that can send the happiest gondola ride into a debate club session in seconds.
Spin to win.
A lot of people aren’t impressed with the trend of higher spin rates. Snowboarding is all about style. It’s hard to make six frontside spins in a row look stylish.
At the 2025 X Games, 19-year-old Japanese rider Hiroto Ogiwara shocked everyone when he landed the first ever 2340 – six and a half rotations – in the big air contest. He won gold. Most people were impressed. Some were concerned.
Photo: WANG ZHAO/AFP via Getty Image
Spinning has taken over the halfpipe, too, but the judges have done a better job at forcing riders to introduce a medley of trick selection into their run.
Due to the nature of the halfpipe contest, more hits means more opportunities to pull tricks out of the bag, and more opportunities to show variety. Even more simply: it’s hard to spin as much as you can over and over again when you have as many as six hits in a halfpipe.
Shaun White is – for now – the greatest halfpipe rider of all time. He pushed boundaries of the discipline from the time he was a teenager until his final Olympics in 2022. He now has the chance to push the boundaries as a league founder.
The Snow League is already forcing athletes to step outside their comfort zone in a few ways. The most obvious is that riders must drop in from both sides of the half pipe. That change adds a layer of difficulty, and forces riders to add some variety to the standard contest runs that they have practiced repeatedly for FIS and Olympic judges.
Photo: Jamie Squire/Getty Images
White could implement a similar rule that would limit riders’ spins. Riders could be required to have at least one straight-air or one spin under 540, or hey, why not both?
That could not only force riders to mix up their runs, but foster a type of creativity that would appeal to the judges, the fans at home, and the riders themselves. Who wouldn’t want to see a Bloody Dracula grab in the pipe? Or a tweaked out method launched into outer space, similar to Su Yiming’s in the 2022 Olympics.
Another thing to keep in mind— The Snow League features a lot of riding. If a rider finds him or herself in the last chance qualifier on day one, that means they could possibly take 10 runs over the course of the two days in order for a chance to land on the podium.
It’s hard to bust out a triple cork or a 1440 over and over again, no matter how physically fit the rider is. Implementing a maximum spin rule – even for just one or two hits throughout the entirety of a rider’s day – could ensure that the riders with the deepest bag of tricks land atop the podium.
The snowboarding community knows it can’t rely on the old heads at FIS to make these changes, and you know what? Ten years ago, that might have been frustrating.
These days, though, we have The Snow League, and we have the emerging X Games League. How these changes are implemented exactly is up to CEO Omer Atesmen, head of competition Sandy Macdonald, and the rest of the administration in charge, but if executed correctly, a little bit of competition could change the game for the entire world.
No one in snowboarding knows that more than Shaun White.
Related: Chloe Kim and Dusty Henricksen Among U.S. Riders Competing at FIS World Championships