{"id":212814,"date":"2015-10-21T06:00:22","date_gmt":"2015-10-20T20:00:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/?p=212814"},"modified":"2015-10-21T06:00:22","modified_gmt":"2015-10-20T20:00:22","slug":"fruit-takes-best-newbie-award","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/fruit-takes-best-newbie-award\/","title":{"rendered":"Fruit takes Best Newbie award"},"content":{"rendered":"

CNMI U18 and Men\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

\"The<\/a>
The CNMI\u2019s Joel Fruit poses for a photo before competing in the Oceania Freestyle Football Championships 2015 in Melbourne, Australia last Sunday. (Contributed Photo)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u201cI actually won the Best Newbie award because I ranked the highest out of all the freestylers competing for the first time,\u201d Fruit said in a message sent to Saipan Tribune yesterday.<\/p>\n

Fruit was ranked seventh out of the 14 competitors and bested fellow newcomers from Sydney, Coffs Harbour, and rural Victoria, according to the event\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cI learned about the tournament from Facebook so I started doing freestyle football sometime in August last year,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

According to the OFFF website, freestyle football is the art of creatively performing tricks with a football.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis 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 \u2018SpArt.\u2019 It is a sport with competitors battling each other head to head and an art in the \u2018routines\u2019 as they are carefully choreography to entertain audiences,\u201d stated in the federation\u2019s website.<\/p>\n

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\u2019 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\u2019s Tommy So and Singapore freestyler Axel Rodriguez.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

With Fruit making it to the quarterfinals and notching the Newbie Award, he earned trickster apparel and a video shoot with Beavon.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was fun,\u201d said Fruit, who left Australia last night and will be staying in South Korea for six days before returning to Saipan.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

CNMI U18 and Men\u2019s National Team member Joel Fruit debuted in the Oceania Freestyle Football…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":29,"featured_media":212821,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[7696,1688,199,7697],"class_list":["post-212814","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-sports","tag-best-newbie","tag-joel-fruit","tag-sport-2-2","tag-three-time-australian"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/212814","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/29"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=212814"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/212814\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/212821"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=212814"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=212814"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=212814"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}