X Games is taking a crack at turning skiing and snowboarding into a team sport.
The new MoonPay X Games League (XGL) Winter Season will kick off in January 2027, with four Clubs competing across a three-stop season. Instead of showing up to an X Games, throwing down a run and going home with a medal, athletes will now be collecting points for their Club and chasing a season-long championship.
The four Winter Clubs are XC Golden State, XC New York, XC Park City, and XC Whistler.
Each team will have 10 athletes: five men and five women, with both skiing and snowboarding represented. More than 180 athletes have opted into the draft, meaning only 40 will make the cut.
The draft goes down September 16 in Los Angeles. Each GM gets five rounds to build their roster, picking one man and one woman per round.
And if you don’t get picked, you’re not completely cooked. Undrafted athletes can still compete as free agents at Winter X Games events and potentially get called up as injury replacements.
So… Who’s on Team Whistler?
This is where things get interesting.
Canadian action-sports media veteran Ryan Stutt is running XC Whistler. He’s spent decades around Canadian skiing and snowboarding through Forecast Ski, King Snow and the Whistler film scene, so X Games didn’t exactly pick a random suit to slap a Whistler logo on a team.
But Stutt has a pretty big pool to choose from.
These aren’t regional teams in the traditional sense. He can draft anyone from the 180-plus athletes who opted in. So does XC Whistler actually become a team that feels like Whistler, or is the goal simply to build the nastiest possible roster?
There are some obvious Canadian names floating around, including Mark McMorris, the most decorated athlete in Winter X Games history. But with only 10 spots and five of them reserved for women, Stutt is going to have some tough decisions to make.
And that’s kind of the whole point.
Making Individual Sports a Team Sport
Skiing and snowboarding have always been pretty individual. Your result is your result.
XGL is trying to change that.
A skier’s finish can now help their snowboarder teammate. A consistent athlete who might not win every event could become incredibly valuable over a full season. And suddenly, an injury doesn’t just affect one athlete’s medal chances, it affects an entire Club.
It also gives X Games something it has never really had: a reason to care about what happens next.
Instead of three unrelated events, there’s now a season, standings, teammates, rivalries and a championship on the line.
Whether that makes skiing and snowboarding more interesting or just makes everyone wonder why we suddenly have fantasy hockey rules for slopestyle remains to be seen.
Either way, the experiment starts September 16, when 40 athletes find out which Club they’re calling home for the winter.
