Fruit takes Best Newbie award

CNMI U18 and Men’s National Team member Joel Fruit debuted in the Oceania Freestyle Football Championships 2015 with a bang, winning the Best Newbie award in the annual competition held in Melbourne, Australia last Sunday.

The CNMI’s Joel Fruit poses for a photo before competing in the Oceania Freestyle Football Championships 2015 in Melbourne, Australia last Sunday. (Contributed Photo)

“I actually won the Best Newbie award because I ranked the highest out of all the freestylers competing for the first time,” Fruit said in a message sent to Saipan Tribune yesterday.

Fruit was ranked seventh out of the 14 competitors and bested fellow newcomers from Sydney, Coffs Harbour, and rural Victoria, according to the event’s website. He was also the lone participant from the Pacific and the one who traveled the farthest to compete in the F3 tournament for the first time. The 18-year-old player left a mark in the Oceania Freestyle Football Federation-sanctioned tournament held at the Queensbridge Square despite being new to the sport, which he just started practicing last year.

“I learned about the tournament from Facebook so I started doing freestyle football sometime in August last year,” he said.

According to the OFFF website, freestyle football is the art of creatively performing tricks with a football.

“This visually spectacular new sport is generally (but not always) practiced to music, either solo, in a group or as part of a competition, choreographed live show or street performance. It is a ‘SpArt.’ It is a sport with competitors battling each other head to head and an art in the ‘routines’ as they are carefully choreography to entertain audiences,” stated in the federation’s website.

Fruit said that at the beginning of the competition, participants were given 60 seconds each to perform tricks for three judges to determine the players’ rankings and pairings. Three-time Australian champion and F3 World Tour veteran Chris Beavon led the panel of judges and was joined by fellow competitor and Melbourne’s Tommy So and Singapore freestyler Axel Rodriguez.

With Fruit getting the No. 7 rankings, he was pitted against the 10th-ranked Anthony Sebastelis from New South Wales and won his first head-to-head match to march into the quarterfinals. In the Round of 8, Fruit was paired against another NSW bet in the person of second-seeded Dylan Stipack, who got a bye in the first round and defeated the CNMI player to make it to the Final Four. Stipack was joined in the semifinals by Victoria’s Jordan Morrison and Karl Victoria, and eventual champion Olly Bowman of New Zealand. The Kiwi beat Morrison in the finals for his third straight Oceania title, while Stipack settled for the third-place honors.

With Fruit making it to the quarterfinals and notching the Newbie Award, he earned trickster apparel and a video shoot with Beavon.

“It was fun,” said Fruit, who left Australia last night and will be staying in South Korea for six days before returning to Saipan.