Judging all of these awards is truly a journey at times. Often, the hardest part is narrowing down the nominees, where there is a clear winner but you want recognize as much of the talent on display over the course of the previous year as possible. This year wasn't like that. There weren't a clear and obvious Newschoolers Skiers Of The Year. Instead, there was a wealth of absolute crushers with no demonstrable standouts. There were however, some big names who didn't make the shortlist this time around. Colby Stevenson, Jonah Williams, Alex Hall and even our eventual breakthrough skier of the year, Jacob Belanger, were all heavily discussed as nominees but narrowly missed the cut.

Let's be clear about one thing here right from the off. This is not the award for the skier with the biggest energy drink budget, most helicopter miles or the most competition points. These are the Newschoolers Skiers Of The Year. The community MVPs, the skiers who put it all on the line making the edits and segments that our community, our strange little niche of the ski world, loved the most. That also means bonus points for those making it happen in ways that our wallets, in particular, could fathom. Yet, every one of these skiers dropped at least one seminal project this past year, be it in a movie or a solo project.

Finn Bilous, was an early name on our list for bringing the NS flavor to the Freeride World Tour in big way. Then right at the back end of the year, his down under banger, Off Beat brought resort heaters to the party, and one of the best vibes of anything we've seen in a long time. For our money, resort skiing is where it's at.

BMack came through with his best year to date in our eyes, with a standout performance in one of our favorite street cuts of the year, ON3P 7. His episode of Off Piste With, opened our eyes to his day to day life too, making for a year to remember. Jesper Tjäder surprised everyone with a home brewed street banger of his own, that was arguably the best street segment of the year. He certainly had no need to go out and film a street segment, career wise, but he went and absolutely fucked shit up anyway, and we are certainly backing that.

Markus Eder has, by and large, moved his skiing to an arena that is beyond our wildest dreams. For Circle Of Madness, he did things that we never could have imagined would go down in Alaska, even five years ago. And were it not for Keesh 3, he would most likely be taking home this award as well.

Our final two nominees had very similar resumés. Antti Ollila and Joona Kangas bookended the Keesh movie, and kicked of the year with the NS Originals banger Dark 'til dark. We discussed long and hard who should take the crown on this one. It was tough to decide between arguably the two most stylish skiers in the game right now. Ultimately, on the basis of marginally greater overall 'presence', we concluded that the Newschoolers Skier Of The Year, for 2025 had to be none other than...

JOONA KANGAS.

https://www.newschoolers.com/videos/watch/1104456/MSOTY-Winner-16x9-mp4