This Olympic Snowboarder Has High Hopes for Shaun White's New Halfpipe Series

Olympic snowboarding icon Shaun White is shaking up the sport that made him a household name—by reinvesting in it.

On Monday, White announced the creation of The Snow League, a new season-long series of halfpipe competitions for professional snowboarders and freeskiers that will debut in the winter of 2025. Complete with prize money and sponsorship opportunities, the new series will be built, according to White, “with athletes in mind first.”

“After all my years competing in many different formats in the snowboarding space, I’ve come to realize that snowboarding and freeskiing athletes deserve a legit professional league,” White said during The Snow League’s announcement at the Cannes Lions Festival in France. “The Snow League will give riders, freeskiers, and sports fans all over the world a destination for what I believe is the most exciting athletic competition in all of sports. Now is the moment to elevate the next generation of winter athletes who are pushing the limits of competition.”

Debuting in March 2025, the Snow League series will feature five events running through the winter of 2026 and will boast a combined prize purse of $1.5 million, split into $250,000 per-event and an additional $250,000 for the season champions. That’s the largest prize purse ever for a snowboarding competition. While the venues have yet to be announced, the first event will be held in the United States, and the remaining four will take place abroad.

The inaugural 2025/26 season will be restricted to the snowboarding halfpipe—one of the most-watched events at the Winter Olympic Games—with freeskiing introduced midway through the season. However, White indicated that he plans to grow The Snow League into a multi-discipline competition series, with up to 15 events per year.

The announcement was welcome news to professional snowboarder Lucas Foster, who represented the U.S. at the 2022 Olympics in Beijing. “The Snow League is a game-changer,” Foster told Outside. “It’ll be an actual series with structure, big prize money, and a new format. It’ll be a lot easier for fans to follow and for companies to buy into, too.”

Foster believes the new series will inject more energy into the small world of competitive snowboarding by giving professional riders more competition options. Since 1994, the world’s best halfpipe snowboarders have had just one season-long series to follow: the Snowboarding World Cup. The series of events is operated by the International Ski Federation, and it comprises six different events: parallel slalom, parallel giant slalom, snowboard cross, halfpipe, slopestyle, and big air.

“The tour is pretty much the same every year, the prize money is really low, and it’s hard for fans to follow,” Foster said. “It’s just gotten so repetitive that it’s almost boring for the riders and fans.”

The Snow League is invite-only, and its participants will include the top-20 men and 16 women in the world per halfpipe rankings from the World Snowboard Points List. These 36 riders will be placed into four heats for qualifiers, ranking based on their best score out of two runs. Eight male and eight female finalists will go on to compete head-to-head in the championships, rising through quarterfinals, semifinals, and finals based on winning a best of three runs. Collectively, riders will gain points based on their performance at each Snow League event, with points aggregated to decide an overall male and female world champion at the close of the series.

The Snow League clearly aims to capitalize on a void in the market, with a number of events—such as Dew Tour and Burton’s U.S. Open—being minimized or axed outright in recent years. While there are still plenty of snowboarding and freeskiing competitions scattered across the calendar, these are one-off events, existing in singularity.

Halfpipe snowboarding lacks what Foster calls a “legit tour, like the World Surf League.” The Snow League won’t just give athletes an arena to compete in and money to bring out the best of the best, but also give fans a continuous narrative and circuit to follow, akin to popular models like the World Surf League, Formula 1 auto racing, and the IFSC World Cup for competitive rock climbing.

Ironically, White’s announcement came just days after the X Games announced a new venture of its own. The long-running extreme sports competition—which prominently features snowboarding—is shifting from a series of one-off events to a year-round, team-based league, dubbed “the X Games League.” Unlike the solo, head-to-head nature of The Snow League, the X Games League will include both winter and summer editions, and teams will be co-ed and multi-disciplinary, with male and female snowboarders and skiers competing on the same team. “We’ve used Formula One as a model for this new X Games League,” said executive chairman Jeff Moorad.

While at first glance the two may seem set in opposition, Foster doesn’t feel the X Games League and Snow League target the same mark. Compared to the team-based, multidisciplinary X-Games League, “The Snow League is a more traditional, individual contest, which is more core to action sports,” he said. “I don’t think it’ll compete with the X Games League.”

Foster hopes the Snow League could also benefit up-and-coming riders, many of whom struggle to earn enough from the sport to cover their costs. In a viral Instagram video posted earlier this year, Olympic freestyle skier Nick Goepper broke down his prize winnings throughout the World Cup season. Goepper said he earned $7,000 overall after placing inside the top-five in four different rounds. “If I placed the same in these sports, I would have earned $1.9 million in tennis, $4.2 million in golf, $70,000 in surfing, $67,000 in bowling, and $235,000 in darts,” Goepper said in the video.

How athletes juggle The Snow League with the World Cup and other competitions is yet to be seen. The 2026 Winter Olympics in Milan and Cortina will run February 6-22, just before the Snow League’s debut event.

“It’ll be interesting to see if any riders don’t do The Snow League to focus fully on the Olympics,” Foster said. “But I think the prize money purse will make it a priority for most people.”