May 5 - 6 Ontario, CA

The ASA has been taking it's Pro Tour to the Ontario Mills mall for the past three years, so this year we decided to change things up a little bit. Instead of taking a normal Pro Tour stop, the ASA introduced two brand new events at Ontario: the Mobile Skatepark Series and The World Team Challenge. The Mobile Skatepark Series is four ten-day events throughout the year featuring ASA Pro Tour and Amateur Circuit competitions, World Cup Skateboarding and bicycle stunt demos and best trick competitions along with an open skatepark during the week.

The World Team Challenge is a specially designed team competition, which featured four teams from each of the major continents. The four teams were:

Americas: Aaron Feinberg, Mike Budnik, Fabiola DaSilva, Santiago Azpurura, Mark Englehart, and Matt Lindemuth.

Europe:Taig Khris, Bruno Lowe, Sven Boekhorst, Nel Martin, and Beni Huber.

Australia: Sam Fogarty, Matt Salerno, Ian Brown, Blake Dennis, Josh Clarke and Shane Yost.

Asia: Eito and Takeshi Yasutoko, Chiaki Ito, Ayumi Kawasaki, Jeeresak Tassorn and Ken Kitada.

Each of the four teams competed in eight different events for the title and bragging rights for the next year. The events were street, street best trick air and tech, street doubles, vert, vert best trick, high air, and vert doubles. I'll give you some of the highlights before I tell you who took it all, so here we go. Let's start with the street best trick competitions. The tech competition was first and the skaters all moved around the course hitting different obstacles, but sooner or later they all ended up on top of the roll in, which had a huge 14ft drop-off grind box that went off one of the sides. This is where the contest turned into a true session, where the skaters were feeding off of each other's tricks and the energy of the crowd.

The tricks started out simply enough with souls and topside mistrials down the box, but soon progressed to the amazing. If I remember well enough, the craziness started with Aaron Feinberg switching from soul to darkside soul. Mike Budnik and Bruno Lowe both hit freestyle fishbrains, although Bruno's was farside on the ledge. It didn't take long for the spins to start and Jaren Grob was the first to attempt one with a 270 into a sunny day. Aaron soon followed suit by spinning 270 into the darkside fishbrain, which by the way, was the winning trick. If Bruno had landed his alley-oop soul who knows what would've happened.

The big air best trick was next and it really came down to only two competitors, Jaren Grob and Beni Huber. Both of these skaters go bigger than anyone I've ever seen and with a seven-foot high 16ft long launch box there was plenty of room to go big. After battling with huge flatspins and fakie spins, Jaren threw out the trick to take it all, a fakie 1080. It was only the second time ever that Jaren has even tried it and the first ever to be seen during a street course competition.

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