Nightime shredding at the Nanshan Ski Resort (Photo courtesy of Mellow Parks).

Apparently Mellow Parks Construction — China’s experts for all things snowboarding — never bothered to check the calendar when they released its Magnum opus Nov. 14. For the snowboarding community both in China and around the world, the New Year comes six weeks early with the release of “Happy Niu Year,” a film documenting some of the most exciting riding in the People’s Republic to date.

“It is helping to put China on the map as far as the world snowboarding community is concerned,” said Olli Fenwick-Ross, marketing director for Mellow Parks. “People know the Nanshan Open now, but they don’t know what else is happening here. This film is reaching a broader audience, to show there are good snowboarders here in China.”

A teaser video is currently online, click here.

Heading down the hill at the Burton Qiaobo Indoor center (Photo courtesy of Mellow Parks).

The new film — which also includes video from the crew’s recent snowboarding trip to New Zealand as well as international rider’s footage shot at last year’s Nanshan Open, located just north of Beijing near Miyun — raises the bar yet again for the minds at Mellow Parks, the foundation for snowboarding in China and now the country’s most visible face of the sport.

“If Chinese kids are into snowboarding, there isn’t too much to watch in China,” said Fenwick-Ross. “They can watch international movies, but the riders, the mountains, the type of snow; it’s different in other countries. The film gives other Chinese some local boarders to look up to. There is a national pride attached.”

“Happy Niu Year” is also the latest in a string of successes that have been aimed at promoting snowboarding inside China. In January 2010, the 8th Annual Red Bull Nanshan Open will take place in Beijing, the largest snowboarding competition in Asia, with this year’s event featuring 18 international riders and six Chinese riders. That’s double the number of local snowboarder’s from last year’s competition.

The DVD currently can be found at Quiksilver, Nitro and other participating stores all over China, and is free to the public. In addition to screening “Happy Niu Year” recently in Beijing and holding a premiere in Shanghai, Mellow Parks Construction said they plan on releasing the entire video online for free starting in January. According to Fenwick-Ross, the bonus footage alone makes the whole DVD worth checking out.

Previously:

• Building Snowboarding from the Peak Down

— Zachary Franklin

"Steve" Yue Wang enters his final year at Cumberland University where he will play both football and soccer.

“Steve” Yue Wang’s eyes light up when you talk football. He doesn’t have any favorite players or memorable moments, either from watching or playing. He can’t rattle off any statistics. He’s never really played the game. These are all things the average American has done if they’re into football.

But Wang isn’t American. He just knows he enjoys football.

“I know the game of soccer, but it isn’t worth it anymore,” says Wang. “I am tired of playing [soccer]. Football is so new, and it is just different.”

Wang, a senior at Cumberland University in Nashville, Tenn., has played soccer all his life. Soccer is what Wang has to do. He’s on a soccer scholarship, which has opened the doors for an education that includes double majoring in both business management and marketing. He holds a 3.7 overall GPA. He plays jazz and blues music in his free time. He picked the English name “Steve” because he says Ray Vaughn sounds like Yue Wang (pronounced like ‘u-way wang’), and he always enjoyed Stevie Ray Vaughn’s music.

But this is a story about what Wang wants to do: Become the first professional Chinese kicker in the National Football League. And to understand what Wang wants to do, it is essential to understand where he comes from and how he’s gotten to this point.

Soccer in the People’s Republic

Wang grew up in Tianjin, China — a city east of Beijing that has a population of 12 million — playing soccer since the age of 10. In China, like other countries around the world, if you are identified as an athlete, you are taught your sport. That’s not to say that Wang did not receive an education, he just played soccer everyday as if it were a job. By 1999, he had qualified for the Chinese junior national soccer team.

Wang has played soccer in every province in China, and in countries as far away as Brazil. In 2004, his coach suggested he try playing in Europe, the pinnacle of the soccer world. Wang was selected for a second division team in Portugal, but for whatever reason — which remains elusive for Wang to this day — he was denied a working visa and his opportunity to play soccer in Europe disappeared.

“Then, my coach suggested I stick with the amateur route of going to America by first attending college and then playing [soccer] in a league,” says Wang. “At least I’d have a degree.”

According to Wang, he was offered a scholarship by an NCAA Division-I school, but because he had not been recruited directly out of high school, he could not attend. Instead, he was recruited to Lindsey Wilson College, a small school in Columbia, Ky.

“I’d never been to America before,” says Wang. “Lindsey is a tiny college in Kentucky. The city is no more than 4,000 people. And it’s a dry county, which means no alcohol. They have an amazing soccer team; the whole team is international. But for me, soccer was beginning to seem old. I was getting tired.”

Finding Football in America

Lindsey Wilson has consistently made the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics soccer championship tournament over the past decade, including overall wins in the 2001-02 and 2005-06 seasons.

It was at Lindsey Wilson that Wang kicked his first football one day after soccer practice when a friend egged him on. “I’d seen football in college, but I thought it was stupid,” says Wang. “Football is about tackling; soccer is about using your skills with your feet. I liked kicking better. And as an outsider, football seemed violent.”

Yet, from that moment on, Wang was hooked to football. In his spare time, he’d head to the indoor basketball courts at Lindsey Wilson and, using the sides of the backboards as imaginary goal posts, would stand on the opposite end of the basketball court and kick the football “through the uprights.” Since no one else was around, he’d simply spin the football on its tip, give it a kick and watch it sail through the goal.

Wang transferred to Cumberland University after his freshman year, saying he couldn’t do the whole “small town thing” anymore. He continued to play soccer for Cumberland, but during his first few days on campus, Wang says he went over to the football coach’s office to see if he could walk on the team.

“He kind of didn’t bother with me, didn’t even look up from his desk,” says Wang of his visit. “He brushed me off, saying they already had six kickers. But I still had soccer.”

Instead, he’d practice along with another kicker from the football team, to the point where Wang says the football coaches refused to allow Wang on the football field or even practice with team balls. In 2008, Wang was named to the Daktronics-NAIA Scholar-Athletes list as a soccer player, along with making First Team All-TransSouth Conference.

But before getting his soccer accolades, Wang made a trip to Atlanta, to try out as a kicker for the Georgia Force, a team for the Arena Football League. Wang never knew if he’d end up getting recruited, as the league suspended its 2009 season. In April 2009, Wang attended the 6th Annual Aguiar Kicking Academy Pro Camp in Las Vegas to see if the NFL was a viable opportunity.

“Before the showcase on the last day — with coaches and scouts there to watch — I’d never kicked a football through the uprights with a snapper and a holder,” says Wang. “That whole process of snapping the ball threw me off. I wasn’t expecting it. I missed my first kick —the easiest one of the kicks we were expected to do. I made the rest.”

Wang was handed an NFL player contract, but was also told there were no guarantees he’d make a team. If he signed the paper, Wang would forfeit his eligibility to play soccer his senior year at Cumberland, dissolving his scholarship and a chances of obtaining a degree. The NFL career would have to wait.

“Preparing” for the NFL

He enters his senior year at Cumberland on an athletic high. He’s at the top of his soccer game, and more importantly, he’ll also be kicking for the Cumberland football team. “The football coach’s attitude completely changed after the NFL camp,” he says, laughing. “He told me, ‘We’re always looking for a good kicker.’”

At 28-years-old, Wang wants football. He understands he would be the first Chinese national to make a professional NFL team should he be selected. And he uses it like a selling point when he speaks.

“He can kick the snot out of the ball,” says Jeff Loucks, head coach of the men’s soccer team at Cumberland. “How many in the NFL can make a 60-yard field goal? Steve can do that. He has so much potential and so much upside.”

Wang says as a kicker you don’t need to be particularly attuned to all the other aspects of football. You don’t need to know formations, and according to Wang, you don’t need to understand how to play the game. Wang says you just have to kick the ball through the uprights. But before Wang can begin his career as a kicker, he might want to try on the uniform first. After all, he’s yet to fully suit up.

— Zachary Franklin

Winners of this year's 7th Annual Red Bull Nanshan Open at the awards ceremony.

“Snowboarding in China is never going to be the way it is in Europe or the United States,” says Steve Zdarsky, the man who runs Mellow Constructions in China. “Every year I say snowboarding is going to take off, but not too many kids start this sport every year. China is more like Russia, where only the wealthy can afford to do a sport like this.”

There is a hint of bitterness in Zdarsky’s voice despite the optimism he and the others who run the Quiksilver Nanshan Mellow Park, a ski resort about 40 minutes north of Beijing, have for snowboarding in the People’s Republic.

It’s not that they’re tired of their jobs, far from it. But after seven years of Nanshan, Zdarsky seems disappointed that snowboarding is not where he wants it to be in China. If it weren’t for Zdarsky and his team, snowboarding would not be anywhere close in popularity to where the sport is right now. The group is synonymous with the dissemination of the sport within the mainland.

But what happens after hosting seven Nanshan Open competitions — the latest incarnation and most successful to date that took place January 10 – 11, featured 20 internationally known riders and four Chinese competitors and gave away $25,000 USD in prize money — produces progressive results for the sport, but does not increase the number of lift tickets sold?

“Sooner or later I am done here because no one ever says thanks for this,” says Zdarsky. “As soon as it becomes a job, I am out. But right now, I love this. I am doing what I love to do.”

One could say Zdarsky is at a crossroads, but unwilling to surrender. He says the group has tried everything they could muster together to get snowboarding more recognized in China.

A rider hits one of the kickers at the Burton Qiaobo Park, the indoor facility the Mellow Parks crew heads to during the summer months.

The group currently has three parks around the country. They’re planning to open a second park in Miyun for 2009, just a few kilometers down the road from Nanshan. When Nanshan dusts off the snow for the summer, the group moves to its Burton Qiaobo Mellow Park, an indoor facility in Shunyi. They’re the only snowboarding group in the world that can claim to have both Burton and Quiksilver sponsorship — arguably the two biggest brand names in the sport. Every weekend during the winter months that Nanshan is open, the group hosts Fat Saturdays, a chance for free demonstrations for non-riders and tons of merchandise to give away. They threw together the Mellow Park tour one year that saw snowboarding in Shanghai, Hebei and Beijing in an effort to bring the sport to a wider audience.

It is mind-boggling just how intertwined snowboarding and Nanshan could possibly be, but every year they manage to take it a step further.

How Nanshan Came to Be

Zdarsky began studying Chinese in Shandong at the university, and on his time off from school he would head to Yabuli Ski Resort. When he first offered his services as a snowboarding instructor, Zdarsky says the instructors at Yabuli had never even heard of snowboarding. By 2000, he was teaching large groups on how to ride.

After he was introduced to someone who said Zdarsky should check out Nanshan, the ski resort offered to pay his school tuition if he would build snowboarding at Nanshan. His first season at the park he was instructing former ski instructors how to teach snowboarding, even making a manual of all the snowboarding terms converted into Mandarin.

When the Nanshan Open first started, it was a group of five snowboarders messing around in the park, and Zdarsky jokes that the grand prize that year was a can of beer. Jump seven years, and the Nanshan Open has grown into China’s largest snowboarding event. And it is the Nanshan Open that has been one of the biggest catapults of the sport in China.

“Five years ago, Nokia was the first big sponsor of the Nanshan Open,” says Zdarsky. “When Nokia cam on board, the event got much bigger. We started getting more international riders.”

Snickers began sponsoring the event for the fourth Open, but over the past three years it has been Red Bull as Nanshan’s main sponsor. Additionally, the Nanshan Open hooked up with Swatch Ticket to Ride, which connects the most prestigious independent snowboarding events around the world, bringing more international recognition for boarding in the Far East.

To Build a Park

Riding one of the obstacles at Nanshan.

“Making the park is the easy part,” says Zdarsky. “It is maintenance that is the trick. Every ski resort in China can do a park if it wants to.”

Zdarsky hooked up with an old friend from back home who had created Mellow Constructions, a company that specializes in building snowboarding parks. Now Zdarsky and company are the go-to people to build parks in the People’s Republic.

“When you are building a park, you have in your head what you want to do, and then it is just a matter of translating it over to the real thing,” says Zdarsky.

The current park at Nanshan consists of two kickers — larger mountains where riders hit ramps to perform tricks while coming down hill — that are actually made from dirt, as the resort uses fake snow. The kickers were redesigned three years ago. There is also an 80-meter, hand-shaped half pipe, and several other boxes for riders to perform tricks on. The other, smaller contraptions scattered about the course will get changed every two weeks.

Landing the Next Trick

“I was just here to learn Chinese,” says Zdarsky. “I thought I was going to be back home after two years.”

While Zdarsky sees all his friends back home getting married or having kids, he’s still hitting the slopes with his team. From day one, Zdarsky aligned himself with Chinese snowboarder Marco Huang. Three winters ago, Olli Fenwick-Ross, the current head of public relations and media for Nanshan, got on board. Additionally, Nanshan has a group of core Chinese riders who show up daily in the winter months to help shape the course in exchange for free lift tickets or gear. It is a small group that has made snowboarding something in China.

But where do Zdarsky and the others go from here? How do they land the next trick and push Nanshan to even bigger fame, or snowboarding to a higher plane? And is that even the name of the game? A big part of snowboarding’s future in China is completely out of Zdarsky’s hands.

Zdarsky says he thinks the Winter Olympics will be a huge boost for snowboarding in China given the Chinese National team's training regime.

“Like every sport in China it needs a hero,” says Zdarsky. “With the Winter Olympics in Vancouver next year, and the Chinese national snowboarding team getting better, should they bring home a medal that will be huge for the sport.”

Zdarsky is confident the team will exceed expectations given that he says they’re training seriously every day — and even use Mellow Park’s summer course to continue during the warmer months.

For those running Nanshan, the team will see a movie released later in 2009 documenting snowboarding in China. The Nanshan Park will begin snowboarding again at the end of the year. But in between now and then, snowboarding in China wants you.

“At the end of the day, if it is just us pushing snowboarding, it is not going to work,” says Zdarsky.

— Zachary Franklin

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