A lot of hard work goes into creating the Hood Jam, one of the premier events on kiteboarding’s calendar. Annelous Lammerts looks at the history behind the Jam and what makes it so unique.

We take an in depth look at how one of kiteboardings most respected events came to life. The Patagonia Hood Jam 2018 went down in history as one of the best ever with amazing wind and incredible riding, but it takes a lot of hard work and effort to get there!

From the 22nd of July till the 28th of July all the best park riders in the world came together to compete in the Patagonia Hood Jam, the second stop of the Kite Park League, in Hood River, Oregon. The Gorge might be known for strong and gusty wind, but during the Patagonia Hood Jam, the riders got better conditions than anyone could have hoped for! Steady wind for the bigger kites every single day, the perfect conditions for the riders to push their limits in competition.

Quite a few of the Kite Park League competitors went straight from the Triple S, the first stop of the Kite Park League, to Hood River since it is easier than flying back to Europe in between. They were the first ‘park rats’ to arrive at the Slider Project. The Slider Project is the first, and still the only, public kite park in the world. Those ‘park rats’, including myself, had to put the features out and put the park together. After that, the park stays in the water all summer and is open for everyone to have fun on and improve their riding. Something that is still unique, it created a lot of talented riders and is a big influence on the level in the Hood Jam these days.

Two locals and competitors on the Hood Jam for the past years, Blaine Baker and Lindsay McClure, organised the first Junior Hood Jam the week before the main event. This was the perfect possibility for young shredders under the age of 18 to compete together and the prize for first place was a spot with all the pro’s in the Hood Jam. KPL Judge Alexander Lewis-Hughes and pro riders Alex Maes and Ewan Jaspan not only judged the competition but also gave the kids tips on how to approach the rails and what they are looking for when they are judging the tricks.

All the young riders improved a lot before and during the event, and it was great to see the progression. The kids were all stepping up their game and pushing each other to land new tricks. For the competitors of the Hood Jam, it was great to see that the next generation landing new moves and getting closer to the level of competing with them.

In the Junior Jam finals, Mark Cafero (USA) showed that he was ready to compete with the best riders in the world by landing a backside 720 and crowmobe of the kickers and really clean and technical rail hits. Jack Rider, a young Canadian ripper, ended up second and Xander Raith also from the USA came in third. Since the first two actually won a video wildcard to compete in the Hood Jam, the open place went to Xander, and he could now join the other two to compete in the Patagonia Hood Jam.

After the Junior event, the Patagonia Hood Jam kicked off. This event has always been organised by the riders, unlike other events such as the Triple S. The Triple S is organised by Real Watersports, which means they arrange prize money, judges, media, crew to move the park and so much more. But for the Hood Jam, it’s different, it’s organised for the riders, by the riders. The Hood Jam has been growing a lot and turned in a very short amount of time into an event with prize money for the athletes, the best media crew and professional judges. The event wouldn’t happen if it weren’t for a group of passionate kiteboarders putting in a lot of time and energy over the years.

Before the Hood Jam came to life, there was another park competition, the Ro Sham Throw Down. The first one was organised in 2010 by Joby Cook and Forrest Rae. Two years before that they were the ones who started the Slider Project and thanks to them this grew into what it is. After some years Rich Sabo and Brandon Scheid took over the Slider Project management. There was no Ro Sham Throw Down at the time, and one evening while having some beers with Colleen Carroll and Craig Cunningham they decided they had to bring back a park event in Hood River.

They put out a two-second video to announce the contest, and the first Hood Jam became a reality!

Everyone rode as much as they could all week, and they would get pizza and watch all the clips at Colleens brother’s house. Steven Borja filmed every single hit, and they would watch all the tricks and judge each other from that. The two girls competing, Colleen Carroll and Lindsay McClure, had to compete with the guys since there was no separate category yet.

After the first year, there were a lot of people that wanted to come and be part of the event. They realised that they needed to turn this into something bigger. Colleen took the responsibility to organise the competition and started to put in a lot of time and energy to turn it into a proper competition. In 2016, the second edition of the Hood Jam was a huge success with pretty much all of the best park riders showing up. Also, the rise of the Kite Park League (KPL) in 2016 and the Hood Jam being part of that made more competitors interested in competing and spending more and more time at the Slider Project.

In 2017 and 2018 the event has been growing mainly thanks to the work that Colleen keeps putting into organising this event. “I didn’t set out to make an event that would be a world tour qualifying event”, Colleen said, “It really started as an idea to bring an event back to the Slider Project. After that first year I really saw the potential in it, and from there it has been growing organically. While on the one hand, it’s a world-class event, on the other it’s still pretty grassroots in nature and a small scale event. Overall I’m really stoked to see people flying from all over the world to come to the Hood Jam.”

Rich and Brandon help her where they can and also still play a big part in making the Hood Jam happen. Brandon always had the role of making sure the park is set up right during the event. He always gets a group of riders to help him during the event and make sure everything is moved and in place and ready for each heat. All the riders know that if you compete in the Hood Jam, you need to help out with moving obstacles or in other ways. Rich is still Slider Project manager and takes care of all the paperwork and pretty much anything else that needs to be done. Hosting the awards ceremony, selling Slider Project t-shirts to raise money, setting up the rider's area at the event and what not. Sensi Graves was in charge of the media distribution this year and makes sure we kept all our awesome sponsors happy and stoked for the next years.

Colleen also gave some advice for people that are thinking about organising an event or competition at their home spot. “Try to keep it as simple as possible in every regard, to try not to overcomplicate things. Try not to go to big to quick because event organisation always ends up being more time and more work than you expect. If you can start something that is a bit smaller, your chance of not getting discouraged or overwhelmed is greater, and you’re going to have more fun doing it. You learn a lot every time you organise an event, so if you start small, you can learn a lot of lessons when there is not as much on the line. Once you have your system figured out you can take and more responsibilities, with bigger sponsorship and have more people travelling from further to attend your event.”

What is really amazing to see is that not only the local shredders and international riders are the ones helping and contributing to making this event into what it is. We have the best media team in the business with Toby Bromwich and Vincent Bergeron, and we are lucky that they have supported our event the past 3 years. Since 2016 they are helping to grow this event even though the budget is small. This also counts for head judge Alexander Lewis-Hughes who also comes to support this competition every year to push park riding in the right direction. Of course, we cannot forget James Ropner, better known as “Homie”, for the amazing “Homie Live-stream” to the KPL-Facebook page during the event and making sure that people at home wouldn’t miss a single trick.

The sandbar that creates the flat water for the Slider Project in the Columbia River has been changing a lot of the past years and this year was definitely harder than other years. The Hood River didn’t have a lot of water flowing down since there wasn’t a lot of snowfall this winter. Instead of having a deep channel behind the sandbar, the whole sandbar got divided over the spot, and it was pretty much shallow everywhere. This meant there was way more moving the park this year compared to other years and also during the Patagonia Hood Jam all the riders had to be on it. Since the regular spot got too shallow, we had to move the park further out to make sure there was going to be enough water for the event. During the Hood Jam, there was still quite a bit of moving around, but Brandon Scheid and Rich Sabo were on it and always rallied enough riders to help move the park fast and not lose any time between the heats. It is great to see that literally everyone in the competition is helping some way or another to make this event happen the way it does.

There were 6 features part of the Patagonia Hood Jam this year. We had the Duotone rooftop and the Pole on the left, the Cabrinha funbox to corrugated tube and Duotone rooftop on the right and both the small Session kicker and big Slingshot kicker set up to both sides. In the end, all the riders got scored from 0-10 on all 6 features, and the top 3 riders of the first heat advanced to the final. The next 3 riders from the would compete in the 9 person dingle heat with each other for the last 3 spots in the final. Head judge Alexander was very clear about what he wanted to see in the competition; “tricks that you would put in a video part”.

Since the conditions were so good the level in both men and women was insanely high, and there were quite a few competition NBD’s (Never Been Done’s). In the men’s division, it was Brandon Scheid landing the first backmobe 720 in competition, and Noé font landed a ridiculous Backside 360 Melan Frontside 360. The Women provided three comp NBDs in the space of a heat. Colleen Carroll and Karolina Winkowska both landing Tootsie Rolls, Sensi Graves landing an Underflip and Katie Potter stomping a Tantrum to blind.

During the first Hood Jam, there was pretty much no budget, and the prizes were very creative. The golden “Hammer Award” is one of those that stayed and turned into a classic Hood Jam award.

This year the award went to the two riders throwing down the biggest trick off the kicker. In the women final it was Colleen getting the highest score with here insane Tootsie Roll scoring a 7.77. For the men, it was Christophe Tack that landed a super clean Pete Rose 5 scoring 8 points. 

The top 3 for both men and women was pretty much impossible to say from watching the heats and during the awards ceremony at Kickstand it was announced that the top 3 men were separated by only 0.11points. Local hero Brandon Scheid was the one that came out on top, followed by Ewan Jaspan with only 0.03 behind him, and Sam Light came in third. In the women, Katie Potter showed she had been improving a lot and thanks to consistently good hits on every feature she secured her first KPL podium. In second place it was Julia Castro who scored the highest score of the whole event, but it wasn’t enough to beat Karolina Winkowska who absolutely killed it on every feature.

The third and last tour stop of the Kite Park League will be at the Kite Mansion in Icapui, Brazil. Make sure to watch the complete recap video on the Kite Park League Facebook!

The Patagonia Hood Jam wouldn’t be possible with all the support from the amazing sponsors! A big thanks to Patagonia, Wind Voyager, Dakine, Full Sail, Hydro Flask, Sunski, Makulo, Duotone, Ion, Stoked Roasters, Raw Elements, Kickstand, Big Winds.

Videos

2018 Patagonia Hood Jam finals show
By Annelous Lammerts

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