Everyone Wants Snowboarding to Grow. But Into What?

A few days ago, I posted a carousel about something I had been noticing across snowboarding and action sports: the sudden rise of new leagues, new formats, new competition structures, and the feeling that everyone seems to be trying to reinvent the way these sports are packaged, followed, and understood.

The post reached way more people than I expected. But what interested me most wasn’t the reach. It was the comments.

Because the more people responded, the clearer it became that this isn’t really a conversation about Snow League, XGL, FIS, Natural Selection, or any single format. Those are just the visible parts of a much bigger conversation.

The real question seems to be: What are we actually trying to grow?

And maybe more importantly: Who gets to decide what snowboarding becomes next?

At first glance, all this experimentation looks like competition. Another league. Another format. Another broadcast product. Another attempt to make snowboarding more understandable, more watchable, more commercially valuable, or more appealing to people outside the core audience.

But underneath that, there is a much more uncomfortable battle. On one side, there is a very real sense that the current models are not working for enough people. Riders need more sustainable careers. Events need funding. Brands need to justify every euro they spend. Media outlets are fighting to survive. Organizers need revenue streams. Athletes need prize money, visibility, support, and storylines that extend beyond one weekend or one clip.

So yes, of course people are experimenting. If the old system served everyone well, there wouldn’t be such a rush to build new ones.

But on the other side, there is also a very valid fear that in trying to make snowboarding easier to package, easier to sell, and easier to understand, we might flatten the very thing that made people care about it in the first place.

One comment summed up that contradiction pretty well: how can we claim to be preserving snowboarding culture while turning it into something that starts to look like a homogenized, mainstream sport? That question stuck with me, because it gets to the heart of the problem.

Snowboarding has always had a complicated relationship with competition. Of course, competition is part of the sport. Some of the best riders in the world are deeply competitive, and contests have pushed progression, created stories, and given riders platforms they might not otherwise have had. But snowboarding was not built ONLY through competition.

It was also built through movies, magazines, local scenes, crews, shops, style, terrain, attitude, and a kind of cultural language that wasn’t always easy to explain from the outside. That was part of the point.

So when we talk about growth, we have to be honest about what kind of growth we mean.

Do we mean more prize money for riders?

More visibility for athletes?

More spectators at events?

More mainstream fans?

More sponsor value?

More media coverage?

More participation?

More cultural relevance?

More people actually going snowboarding?

Because those are not all the same thing, and depending on which one you prioritize, you end up building very different versions of the future.

If you think the main problem is that people don’t understand competitive snowboarding, you build clearer formats. If you think the problem is that riders don’t have sustainable careers, you build prize money, contracts, and more consistent platforms.

If you think the problem is sponsor value, you build a more predictable product. If you think the problem is culture, you protect the spaces where style, creativity, local scenes, and independent media can survive. If you think the problem is audience, you build better storytelling.

And if you think the problem is ownership, you start asking who has the money, who has the platform, and who gets to shape the model everyone else has to work around.

And this last one matters... Ultimately, a lot of this comes down to money. If the core doesn’t have it, or doesn’t spend it, then the core companies don’t have much of it either. And if the core companies are under pressure to prioritize sales, survival, and measurable ROI, then the people with the disposable funds to experiment are often not the people who necessarily have snowboarding’s best interests at heart.

That doesn’t mean every outside investment is bad. It doesn’t mean every new league is soulless. It doesn’t mean business and culture are automatically enemies. But it means we need to pay attention to what kind of models are being built, who they are being built for, and what they make more valuable. Their purpose.

Because the danger is not simply commercialization. Snowboarding has always had money in it. Brands, contests, films, magazines, shops, resorts, agents, sponsors, none of this exists outside business. The danger is when the business model starts deciding what snowboarding is supposed to look like. And that is where things get complicated.

A few people brought up local events, banked slaloms, low-rise pipes, quarterpipes, slushy sessions, and grassroots gatherings as signs that there is still a very real appetite for something different, something less polished and less controlled and nore connected to the actual act of riding.

And honestly, I think that matters just as much as any new global league. Because maybe the future of snowboarding is not one thing.

Maybe it is not leagues or no leagues, core or mainstream, competition or creativity. Business or culture. Maybe the healthier future is one where different parts of snowboarding are allowed to serve different purposes.

Big events can create visibility, prize money, and stories that reach beyond the bubble. Local events can protect participation, community, and belonging. Films and magazines can preserve depth, style, history, and cultural memory. Riders can compete and still be artists and brands can support progression and still be held accountable.

In the same way, new formats can bring energy and still be questioned. I'm a big believer that two opposite things can be true at the same time: snowboarding can need better business models, Aand snowboarding can be damaged by treating it only as a business opportunity.

That, to me, is the tension we need to sit with. Dismissing every new format as selling out is too easy, and accepting every new league as progress is too lazy.

The real work is asking better questions: What problem is this actually solving? Who benefits? Who gets left out? Does this create more opportunity for riders, or just a cleaner product for investors? Does it help people understand snowboarding, or does it make snowboarding more generic? Does it bring new people in, or does it simply repackage the sport for people who were never going to care anyway? Does it support the culture, or does it extract from it?

And maybe the biggest question of all: Are we growing snowboarding, or are we just building more things around snowboarding?

More leagues, more events, more formats, and more content do not automatically raise the tide. Sometimes they do. Sometimes they just add more ships to waters nobody has properly understood. (And I'm straling this metaphor from one of the most active snowboarding Insta trolls stanfromyobeat). And in snowboarding, the tide is the culture.

If you don’t understand that, you can build all the structures you want, but you might still miss the thing that makes any of it worth caring about.

So yes, I think the rise of Snow League, XGL, and other new formats is interesting. Not because any of them are guaranteed to be the answer, but because they reveal that a lot of people have realized the current models are not enough.

Realization matters, experimentation matters. But so does the discomfort around it.

Because the comments reminded me that people still care deeply about what snowboarding is, not just where it can go. That could be the most hopeful part. Not that everyone agrees. They clearly don’t.

But that people are still paying attention, still questioning, and still pushing back. Whilst they keep asking whether growth is worth it if the thing being grown becomes unrecognizable, it's a good thing. We are still soul-searching, and we haven't given up.

Maybe it means there is still a soul worth fighting over.