How did you 'Discover' footbag?

ByrnsiE · Post by **ByrnsiE** » 21 Sep 2007 20:19

My story I've been hacking for a good 2 to 3 years. I've played soccer for 10 years, me being 17 now so I've had a lot of experience juggling with my feet. Do a lot of solo hacking just goofing off at my house or with a bunch people durring class. One my friends started to footbag and i thought it was pretty cool and similar to hacking. So I've been footbaggin for a few weeks now. Starting to get used to stalling over kicking but one thing I can't get down is using my left foot. I'm so used to always kicking everything and stalling my right that I feel like my left foot is just dead weight.

calemccoy · Post by **calemccoy** » 10 Oct 2007 20:24

i met my freind jonny at a new years eve party one year. i had never met him before, but he had a sandmaster with him. he was just outside kicking back and forth in the kitchen at the place and i was like "cool". my family made a trip to eugene the next weekend, and i bought a sandmaster of my own at a smokeshop for 8 dollars. i was like "wow it must be nice, its expensive".now i spend 30-40 dollars on bags

i went back to school that monday with it, and found another kid with a sandmaster, corey wetzel. to this day, he still only inside kicks, but he could do both legs, and like 40 in a row or something. i HAD to beat him haha. so i worked and worked.... i remember getting stoked in a safeway for getting 36 kicks vividly haha. so, i circle kicked at my school for like a year until sophomore. then i went back to eugene and found the unfortnately now-closed flying clipper shop. i bought some bags, and tricks of the trade 1 and 2. i went home and became mesmerized. the fanciest move i had EVER heard of was mirage, and it was like only the 5th trick on the dvd haha. so, i started a footbag club at my school, and became best friends with jonny, the kid at the new years eve party. my school's footbag club is dead now becasue jonny moved away, thus leaving me the sole serious footbagger at my school. i now shred with kids who go to school in talent, a town 8 miles from here, but i see them evey weekend at church and during the week after school. i found footbag.org, then modified, and i heard angels sing in the background haha. i went to worlds this year, and now i know this is what i want to do in life. im mostly tiltless now, and know some 3 and 4 adds. next year, for my senior year of high school, i might do foreign exchange to czech republic... and 08 worlds are in prague! woohoo! so thats my story... and there are years more of footbag stories to come, i just know it.

EoghanMcDowell · Post by **EoghanMcDowell** » 10 Oct 2007 22:12

Heres what happened. For the majority of my middle school years i circle kicked on and off. I tried to get into it every now and then, but every time i dropped a kick i just gave up. Then when i went to my last year in middle school, i met a friend who changed my life. Not only in the respect of footbag. But anyway he did the whole hacky sack thing, just kicks, but he was really good at keeping the bag up. He took me in and taught me the how to play "Hacky Sack" Like Cale i had heard of the "Mirage" and thought it was like impossible. Same thing with around the world. I remember my first ATW, in my room, while Dale was on the computer. I was like "DUDE I JUST LANDED AROUND THE WORLD AJFSKJDF!" It just turns out that Cale was a close friend of of my hack teacher, so i heard stories of how he had landed mirage and butterfly, and i knew i just had to at least get to his level, if not surpass it. Now i am an almost completely tiltless player, though i can foot some 4 and 3 adds like osis, butterfly, Pixie Osis, Pixie Mirage, Pixie Butterfly, Torque, Toe set drifter, Paradox Mirage, Whirl, Paradox Whirl, and other things. As for my Mentor, i have surpassed him, but in the last two days he's improved MASSIVELY! I can't comprehend it. He went from not being able to do a toe stall on his flip side to being able to foot Mirage, Butterfly, Osis, Pixie set, ATW, Legover, and pickup in ONE DAY. I was incredibly proud, and he doesn't even wear lavers, though he's getting some jet black ones this Friday (LUCKY) I shouldn't be complaining, i got Quantums. Back to my story. Everything i know I've learned through the internet. I've had very little exposure to footbag aside from one AWESOME meeting with the Eugene crew in oregon. In fact I'm seeing them again this Saturday (Can't wait, the fact I'm going with Cale makes it even cooler, and no adults to! Yeah!) Well thats my story. Me and Cale i think are the only really serious footbagers in the rouge valley, (Dallas is getting there) But who knows, maybe we can recruit some people. If i see someone who actually finds what i do interesting, and doesn't shy away when ever i do an "Insane" trick like a mirage, maybe they might actually want to learn. Until then, i bid you fare well.

The Rhino · Post by **The Rhino** » 11 Oct 2007 02:44

rock on guys! Now, with all these stories of how we all started, form some tactics get some new peeps started!

"angels began to sing"

LOL

FlexThis · Post by **FlexThis** » 18 Oct 2007 13:02

OK - Here is Flexy's story.

I have always been interested in kicking a soccer ball from like 6 years old. I could roll it up from a toe stall to a knee bumb to a header and then head it like 10 times in a row. I would practice this a lot. I was going for "Dizzy Dean" from CA Games.

Anyways I hated Hacky Sack at first. Even clowned guys for playing hacky sack instead of juggling a soccer ball. I never played soccer but I had soccer friends and everyday during lunch we would form a soccer juggling circle and basically play hack with it. So some skill had already evolved before I even learned about hacky sack.

Later in college I was struggling with Engineering. Math was kicking my ass and I changed majors to art. The art department was full of blue haired hippy wierdos and their strange behavior. I am from the south and this is seen as ultra rebelious behavior to even change your hair color. So to me these guys and girls were freaks.

They often formed hack circles between classes and I mostly watched. I was too conservative and too clean cut to fit in, or so I thought to myself. Luckily a long time friend that I played baseball with at age 9 was in most of my art classes. He had evolved into a stoner and re-introduced me to "our" favorite stoner past-time. Fun thing is it was him who finally got us into a circle. He found a 2 panel vinyl nightmare of a bag in his car. It was an NC Tarheels novelty bag that had been given to him by his mother on his birthday some 5 or 6 years before. He liked it so he kept it in his car.

Well we started from there. He would pull it out and we would kick it for an hour before class. After we had improved we moved into the freak circles and played Hacky Sack. We moved on to hemp hacks and sipa sipas, but we were still playing hack. Eventually my friend stopped playing, I think he failed out of college. That's when I met Jason Crook.

At the time Jason was an amateur skater and damn good too. I switched to skateboarding but sucked at it. So I mostly putted around light years behind J. But J liked Hacky Sack and together we honed our skills into tricks like ATW (both feet both directions), squeeze, lap stall, neck catch, sole stall, Jesters, ATW Jesters (aka butterfly kick) and the blind sole kick.

We were getting bored playing hack and even were crowned kings of college because we could hold the bag for so long before passing it.

THEN - ONE DAY - This girl walks up to us as we were circle kicking a lop-sided hemp sack (that we loved). She said, here try my bag, I'll be right back. And she tossed a broken-in JUICE footbag to us. At first I said, um no, we like our sack. Jason however, stopped me from making the biggest mistake of my life and said, naw Damon man, this bag is nice let's at least try it first.

Within the first or second pass we both had epic turns kicking and stalling the bag. We still had not seen any footbag yet. We had even started inventing a point system for kicks and invented cheesy combos as tricks.

Well the girl comes back and says her boyfriend wants to play with us he is pro. Jason and I thought, she must be crazy, a hacky pro? We hadn't invented the sport of Hacky Sack completely yet, let alone met any pros that competed. I at least was skeptical.

The pros name was Dan and he was a net player who freestyled for fun. But he was no pro. He started all his runs with alternating toe stalls straight to legovers done about calf high and stiff legged. We were blown away seeing this live for the first time. We asked him a ton of questions and he turned us on to dot org. He also brought over 3 videos that we dubbed off of him as we were watching for the first time. We had an 8 mm VCR recording from our VHS as we watched, but we didn't tell him.

The Vids were, "Trick of the Trade", "Raw Shred", and some Montreal torunament footage from 93. 3 years before BAP became BAP. I still remember seeing Eric Wulff and Peter Irish playing tillty hack, it was great. Tuan Vu is in it too busting DATW between toe stalls and kicks.

This was our turning point and what got us hooked. There were 2 players that I wanted to emulate so I drew their faces on the toe boxes of my first pair of Lavers. Those players were Peter Irish and Daryl Genz.

Since then I have met a ton of Pros, been to numerous tourneys including Worlds, insulted many shredders here and on flipsider including Kenny Shultz, apologized, quit for 5 years, and now play 3-4 times a week at an above average level (3-4-5s).

It has been an awesome ride and although I never made my Dream of BAP a reality, I'm hoping to make the senior tour by 55 - lol.

Stoneman · Post by **Stoneman** » 18 Oct 2007 15:06

I dont actually know

AllTheWay · Post by **AllTheWay** » 20 Oct 2007 08:07

I was walking to one of my classes at college and i saw a few kids kicking in a circle, i had time to spare so i join. then a few days later i got a sandmaster. week later i was at school and saw a kid sitting on a ledge. I asked him if he wanted to kick a sandmaster around, he said ok. then i was amazed at what he could do. told me about lavers and such. that was in sept. 06. ive been playing everyday for at least 3 hours a day since. hit up my 1st comp in rochester with a buddy kyle (GRASS) wanted to make it to worlds but couldnt, bummer...

Alf · Post by **Alf** » 11 Nov 2007 07:27

I discouvered footbag, back in 1999. Some older guys in my city were playing on the street with some of these crochet-big-floppy things.
But,...I was stunned.
I bought my own in a skate shop in the next, "big" town and started playing.
I directly started with freestyle, but just with the right foot and not very often. It was just fun to hang around with the guys and shred.
Over the years I became better and more involved in the sport.
I bought better equipment ( thnk you "planetfootbag"

), went to some events (just as a viewer) and started playing as often as I could.
But my knees didn't liked the sport the way I did and so I had to quit footbag for nearly 3 years.

At the beginning of this year, I bought some stuff for my holidaytrip to asia and saw a sand filled footbag in a shop.
I bought it, shredded the hole trip and now I'm back in the game.

I'm working hard on my shredding technique and even more hard on my footbag sewing skills.
I love it, and hopefully I can stay in the game for the rest of my life.

Benzilla · Post by **Benzilla** » 11 Nov 2007 13:12

i got into footbag by losing my fav hacky sack. i couldn't find a place that i could buy another one from so i searched it over the internet. I found footbag and was amazed. I started stitching footbags right away because footbags, i thought at that time, were way too expensive. I eventually bought a sandbag and 2 pro stitched bags, lavers, and recently quantums.

I love footbag. at school im referred to as the hacky sack kid. its cool to be different amoung the crowd.

Grade Zero · Post by **Grade Zero** » 11 Nov 2007 21:49

Benzilla wrote: I love footbag. at school im referred to as the hacky sack kid. its cool to be different amoung the crowd.

Haha, same here. They gasp when I drop...which I find annoying and amusing at the same time

Compared to most beginners, I'm not that good though.

Benzilla · Post by **Benzilla** » 12 Nov 2007 07:20

people at my school think im the best in the world. Even after i show then a vid of vasek.

But it does get annoying when they ask me to bust a move and i don't have my quantums on so i trry, fail and they're like "you suck", whether they're joking or not...it hurts

Pengu · Post by **Pengu** » 12 Nov 2007 08:33

My journey into footbag started one fateful night while I was doing something in my window. My window overlooks a beautiful view of a parking lot and there, I saw the infamous Tom Mosher playing footbag with a friend. I was intrigued, although admittedly, more so by the shirtless boys than the footbag. I called out to them, "Hey, what are you all doing?" And Tom goes, "Hey! Watch this! I'll show you something cool."

A few days later, I called Tom up after he had smoothly slipped me his number the night we met, and we played some hack in the same parking lot late at night.

About a month later, Tom had convinced me to get my first pair of lavers, taught me to make my first 32, and KICKASS happened where I met all the cool east coast regulars of the RFA and many of the Montreal and Ontario players for the first time. After meeting these people, I was hooked. I wasn't convinced about footbag at the time, but the people made me realize it's worth sticking around.

Bringerofpie · Post by **Bringerofpie** » 12 Nov 2007 13:05

Benzilla wrote:people at my school think im the best in the world. Even after i show then a vid of vasek. But it does get annoying when they ask me to bust a move and i don't have my quantums on so i trry, fail and they're like "you suck", whether they're joking or not...it hurts

No one realizes how important shoes are.

Guydro · Post by **Guydro** » 13 Nov 2007 08:05

Matt Cross wrote:I saw a hippy in birkenstocks doing DATW and osis. I was blown away. I've been addicted to freestyle for 8 years now.

Matt Cross wrote:my girlfriend from 7th grade broke up with me and started dating this guy named Nick Schultz, who was good at hacky sack and skateboarding, and considering the girl I was crazy about chose him over me, I figured he must be a lot cooler than me (and he was) so I wanted to do the stuff he could do. Nick and I were friends through all that, and still are when I run into him, so don't think there was like a jealous rivalry, etc etc. anyway, that's how I got into footbag. I pretty much left trick boarding behind a while back.

Which one was it? Or was one Hacky and the other one Shredding?

I have not been playing long. On 4-20 of 2007 (5yrs after I got married) I went to the beach. I was in a gift shop when I saw a crocheted hacky. Then said what the fuck and bought it. I was happy I did.... Not best footbag...But it got me into the sport. I learned all my basic kicks with it. Then I started buying footbag from ebay. They are waste of money to me. At least all the ones I spent my money on. They lasted about a week before all the sand came out of it. But I still had fun with them and learned most of my stalls. Thats how I got in to hacky sack.

Now Freestyle Footbag.....That is another story. I thought I was getting good at the sport (hacky). I played for hours a day. Some how I heard that the 2007 World Footbag Championships was coming to orlando this year. The first time in orlando ever!!!! So I had to check it out. That is all it took for me. I had saw a few of videos of people shredding. But nothing like that. LIVE.....THE BEST IN THE WORLD. I was blown away. I leaned more that just watching the best. Not to even get stated on finding out about the equipment. Better footbags, how to mod and lace my shoes. I have been picking up a new 32 panel footbag from everone that will answer my PM's. I love to SHRED now. I was on the outside of the circle that week....But the next time I go to the Worlds. I will be on the inside circle.

balancebagger88 · Post by **balancebagger88** » 19 Nov 2007 07:56

I was going to a football game and saw some senoirs hackin so i joined in,two weeks later made a 2 panel bag,lost it and used chorchocted(woven) bags for about a year before i got internet acess and found .org,ordered a phoota bag bird.After a little while i started to make my own bags and in the process found modified.in.Short simple and to the point.

crazylegs32 · Post by **crazylegs32** » 22 Nov 2007 20:31

I have a weird one. I was at a rave all tripped out and ran across a group of 3 or 4 Asian guys with birth defects shredding. They each had arm problems like missing them completely or having short useless arms like a t-rex. I couldnt tell all of what they were doing, or how good they were. I did see they were doing atw and legovers and saying how they were really easy moves. Me and my friends said they sold their arms to the devil to hack

JeffRichards · Post by **JeffRichards** » 24 Nov 2007 13:14

at Jons story and Damons was my favorite so far.

I started hippy hacking with Chris Obara and soon found footbag.org. I got Tom from CIC's screen name and he told me about Kaushik(another player in my town who happoned to live in the same building as Jon Nagela). That was the beginning of my first real shred sessions.

mikep · Post by **mikep** » 10 Dec 2007 09:09

I originally discovered footbag when my brother and I got the Klutz footbag book as a gift. This was back in the early 80's. Through high school and college I kicked in circles between (or instead of) classes. I didn't really see much in the way of stalling tricks back then. Time passed, I grew up and didnâ€™t really have anyone to kick with so I sort of lost interest. A few months ago my son found my hacky sack in the attic and asked about it. We started kicking together and he promptly lost the footbag. I started researching online to buy a replacement and discovered freestyle footbag. I have tried a couple different footbags but now I have a Mr Sandbag (several, actually, since I know the kids will lose a couple). It is pretty exciting to have re-discovered something I really enjoy, and all the online resources make it interesting even as a beginner.

Oh, and we eventually found my old hacky sack, which is nice, since I am really attached to it.

Ndeschamps · Post by **Ndeschamps** » 20 Dec 2007 09:16

At first I never knew of the term footbag, I always called it hacky sack and I only ever tried kicking, till one day I was searching you tube for some awesome hacky sack videos, I ended up viewing some footbag videos and ever since I was passionate to learn how to play! So I went on footbag.org and found a couple players near me and started shredding with them, to this day I mostly play on my own, sometimes I play with a couple friends at school

Kljopa · Post by **Kljopa** » 20 Dec 2007 09:57

Ndeschamps wrote:At first I never knew of the term footbag, I always called it hacky sack and I only ever tried kicking, till one day I was searching you tube for some awesome hacky sack videos, I ended up viewing some footbag videos and ever since I was passionate to learn how to play! So I went on footbag.org and found a couple players near me and started shredding with them, to this day I mostly play on my own, sometimes I play with a couple friends at school

Cool, show your friends the footbag videos, the ones who like to kick.Maybe they will join ya