Hits coming for Sladics

Bryce Alderton

Chanelle Sladics grew up in Newport Beach, where she played soccer

and field hockey for Newport Harbor High.

In those days, a hit for Sladics meant striking a ball with her

foot or a stick.

She still hits, though the term has taken on an entirely new

meaning for the 20-year-old.

Sladics is a professional snowboarder.

The “hits” now in her vocabulary refer to how many rails or jumps

she successfully masters.

Sladics, who turned professional in 2004, will join 14 other women

competitors in SG Magazine’s third annual EMU Australia Queen of the

Mountain invite event, benefiting breast cancer research, at the

Mountain High resort in Wrightwood today.

Sladics won the Pro Rail Jam title at the event last year and

placed second in the slopestyle competition.

Those accomplishments add to the growing list of feats for

Sladics, the 2002 International Snowboard Federation Halfpipe Junior

World champion who made her second appearance at the X Games in late

January. Sladics placed 12th out of 20 competitors in the

preliminaries of the women’s slopestyle. The top 10 advanced to the

finals.

In slopestyle events, riders maneuver their way through a terrain

park designed with jumps, rails, boxes and hips. Riders are to

complete the course with creativity and grace. Judges award scores

based on style, amplitude, rotation and overall impression.

Sladics bettered her X Games finish with a seventh place in the

women’s slopestyle final in the Gravity Games at Copper Mountain,

Colo., last week. She placed higher than Tara Dakides, an X Games

gold medalist in the 2000 and 2001 Big Air events.

She spends summers in Newport Beach and lives in Mammoth Lakes,

site of the last Gravity Games in 2000, in the winter.

She will spend the rest of her season focusing on a part in an all

girls snowboard video -- meant to portray the progression of women’s

snowboarding -- tentatively set for release in September.

Snowboarding officially earned Olympic status for the 1998 Games

in Nagano, Japan, has steadily gained popularity with added exposure.

Sladics also appeared on an MTV show featuring snowboarding,

surfing and skating competitions alongside stars such as Tony Hawk.

Trips to Mammoth during high school peaked her interest in the

sport.

“I was always a weekend warrior,” Sladics said. “Snowboarding was

a fun thing I did on Sundays. I would go to Mammoth on all of my

breaks.”

She played link on Newport’s field hockey team but broke her

collarbone skateboarding, cutting her senior season short.

“I was such a field hockey girl, I loved it,” Sladics said.

Once the injury healed, Sladics began entering more professional

snowboarding events. In 2002, she took third in slope style USA

Snowboarding Association’s national championships at Mammoth

Mountain.

Newport senior Ashley Gleason, a teammate of Sladics on the field

hockey team, saw her passion toward snowboarding back then.

“She would miss camps to go the USA junior Olympics,” Gleason, a

standout pitcher on the Sailors’ softball team, said She is very

athletic.”

Gleason didn’t hesitate in her answer when asked if she thought

Sladics would choose snowboarding for a profession.

“Oh yeah, she is that type of person who can do a lot of different

things.”

Sladics enrolled at UC Santa Barbara after graduating from Newport

in June 2003, but four days into the semester, Sladics switched gears

back toward the snow.

“I realized, after talking to a teacher, that it would be hard to

balance both [snowboarding and school],” Sladics said.

So she opted for snowboarding, with sponsors such as Oakley,

Billabong and Campbell’s Soup and Venue Snowboarding.

Sladics has appeared on MTV Sports’ “3-Way Threat” and is part of

the Campbell’s Soup-at-Hand team with Tara Dakides and pro

skateboarder Bucky Lasek.

Saturday marks Sladics return from a partially torn meniscus in

her right knee suffered during the Gravity Games.

The injury didn’t require surgery, but as of Wednesday, Sladics

hadn’t snowboarded in 1 1/2 weeks, a long time for one who will

compete in roughly 11 events by the time the season is done.

Just the beginning of what she hopes will be a long career in the

business.

Sladics said: “We get to travel around the world doing something

we love and get paid and marketed to do it. As long as you don’t take

it for granted, it’s one of the best jobs.”