Schidt

The first Street League competition is over, and it’s probably an interesting enough trend in the development of skateboarding competitions for me to mark it with some sort of post. It’ll either fade away or move from strength to strength depending on how it goes in the mainstream media. There were some interesting results from the Arizona leg of Street League event compared to the Maloof Cup. I guess Chris Cole, P Rod and Ryan Sheckler will be wondering if they made the right choice in jumping off the Maloof/Dew gravy train. Nyjah and Nugget took out first and second respectively, correcting some possible injustices that some commentators thought about the Maloof scorings. Sheckler had the similar issues with scoring in other competitions when he was younger. Probably a little difficult to “adjust” the scores when the scoring is live.

The Winners
1st – Nyjah Huston 116 points – $150,000
2nd – Shane O’Neill 114.9 points – $80,000
3rd – Torey Pudwill 112.8 points – $25,000
4th – Sean Malto 111 points – $10,000
5th – Chris Cole 109.6 points – $7,500
6th – Chaz Ortiz 102.2 points – $6,000
7th – Paul Rodriguez 100.1 points – $5,500

The Best Trick Winners
Creative Section – Peter Ramondetta – Ollie Impossible 50/50, 6.2 points – $5000
Line Section – Shane O’Neill – Nollie Backside Heel over the gap then Switch 360 Flip down the stairs, 6.3 points – $5000
Tech Section – Shane O’Neill – Nollie Kickflip Noseslide 270 shuvit – 6.9 points – $5000
Big Section – Was a draw between Chris Cole and Nyjah Huston with 7.5 points each. Chris Cole did a gap out to frontside 180 switch backside feeble on the kinked rail with Nyjah Huston doing a gap out to big spin flip boardslide on the same rail. The next best trick settles the draw. Chris Cole’s three sixty flip 50-50 on the big section hubba beat Nyjah Houston’s second best trick. – $5000
Best Overall Trick – Chris Cole gap out to frontside 180 switch backside feeble on the kinked rail. – 7.5 points – $5000

Here is the ESPN take on the competition and the video I embedded from their site.

In the US it will feature on ESPN2 on September 15th at 8pm EST/5pm PST so maybe there won’t be too much more footage forthcoming before the screening.

Here are some Am Cam clips from the event. Not filmed very well but cool because it’s what you’d see if you actually went to it, but not so cool if you actually wanted to know what went on. Just looking through some of the clips it doesn’t look like quite the spectator event that I thought it would be and I guess it’s probably more designed for TV, and in reality that’s where the money is anyway.

Here’s DC’s take of “The DC Pro”. There is going to be some exclusive coverage of the contest on the site a little later and I’ll link it up once it appears. Until that goes up here is a link to the Street League Qualifier that was held earlier.

Here’s a video of some of the pre competition publicity. A video I liked because it featured second placeholder Shane O’Neill who I thought got a little cheated at Maloof – New York, just shows sometimes qualifying in a competition sometimes isn’t as good as being ripped off. Nugget suddenly became a lot of peoples new favorite skater.

… and finally an article from ESPN giving some of the background about Street League for those who thought it was a basketball (streetball) league.

Tags: Arizona, Chaz Ortiz, Chris Cole, DC Pro, ESPN, Nyjah Huston, Paul Rodriguez, Ryan Sheckler, Sean Malto, Shane O'Neill, Street League, Torey Pudwill