so it rained the other day...will have to shred with him another time. Received my package from Lotus with the bags for the comp yesterday. Yay!
Going to do up some flyers and shit for the competition in the next couple of days...exciting times.
'Can I Scream' magazine comes out today. I'm quite excited
There's even a footbag article in there.
This is the article, as I don't expect anyone else will be grabbing a copy of a zine mainly based on heavy music that's pretty well only available in Canberra at the moment
<b>Australian Footbag Titles</b>
Footbag? I hear you asking…what is that? Footbag is more commonly known as the game “hacky sack”, though hacky sack was actually the brand name used by the company Wham-O for one of the first footbags to come out during the 1970s.
There were some serious competitors assembled at the Melbourne Sports and Aquatic centre on the 15th January 2006, with many coming from interstate and even international guests from New Zealand and Canada to compete at the Australian Freestyle Footbag Championships. There were a variety of events to compete in ranging from consecutive kicks for the novices, to the main events of Routines, Sick 3 and Shred 30.
With only two competitors in the consecutives, won by Janis from Melbourne, it was soon time for the routines to begin. A footbag routine consists of players performing tricks choreographed to a song, chosen by the player. The moves are mainly done by moving the legs around the bag, but also various other parts of the body, such as by ducking under the bag, then performing a trick. Routines last 2 minutes in opens and 1 minute 30 in intermediates.
The intermediates also featured a first, Caroline Birch, the first female competitor at the Australian titles. Hopefully there will be more female competitors in years to come. Enough so that there could be a division for the females. Time will only tell on that matter. All intermediate segments were won by Toby Suggate from Dunedin who showed an excellent knowledge on the basic skills and will be rising to bigger and better things in the future. Jason Po from Newcastle came in second, with Caroline third and Matt Boyall taking fourth place.
The music choices used in the open routines showed the wide variety of interests in the footbag scene with song selections ranging from Parkway Drive to MC Hammer or Bloodhound Gang to various trance and dance tracks to everything in between. With three Ausfootbag accredited judges giving scores out of six for both technical ability and also artistic ability, it was the players’ job not only to show their skills, but also to hit moves on the beat to get a better score.
Phil Morrison, another New Zealander was the winner of the event, with a near flawless routine, only dropping three times in a highly skillful routine full of difficult links. Canada’s own Dylan Fry came in second with Melbourne local Dan Ednie coming in third. The writer of this article, Daniel Boyle, was not so lucky, after a strong start, too many drops sent him down to 9th place.
The sick 3 is a challenge to hit your best three moves all in one combo. A problem for quite a few of the contestants in the open division was that they were trying to hit too big a combo, and failed to post any score at all. The surprise packet of the tournament was Jamieson Hickingbotham’s 3rd place in the sick 3 with an impressive combo of ripwalk>paradox drifter> paradox symposium whirl. The event was again taken out by Phil Morrison, who was really the star of the event, with Dan Ednie taking honours for second.
Shred 30 is an event which is decided by a formula based on the difficulty of moves hit and the number of unique tricks and contacts. Queensland youngster Jesse Malouf made the most of this with his run full of technical difficulty and lacking in drops taking him to second place, with Dylan Fry’s score of 219.56 enough to beat most of the world’s best. Phil Morrison came in third place.
After all the official events, a “shred battle” event was had. The rules were that each player had to play at their own skill level, making it somewhat of a handicap event. It was one on one, and the first to drop was eliminated. An early upset was Jason Po knocking out Dylan Fry. He went on to lose to Daniel Boyle, who went into the final of three with Dan Ednie taking victory and Phil Morrison just clenching second place.
The week in Melbourne also contained the inaugural Ausfootbag AGM, with members representing various states planning for the future of Australian footbag. Footbag is a sport that has the chance to grow if people are to become more aware of it.
To find out more about footbag
Australian Footbag:
www.ausfootbag.org
Footbag Worldwide:
www.footbag.org
International Footbag Forum:
www.modified.in
Ace Footbags:
www.acefootbags.com
Elemental:
www.elementalfootbags.com
If you are interested in footbag in the Canberra region
Contact Daniel Boyle at
boyle@footbag.org or 0400477024.
He runs the newly formed Canberra footbag club, based at the University of Canberrra.
<i>Daniel Boyle</i>
so yeah...it's aimed at an audience pretty well unaware of footbag, so maybe even a few converts will come from it! Also going to write an article for nowUC, which is like an online school paper at uni. I should get to that sometime soon.
Anyway I'm really excited about the zine coming out. Being issue 1, and us having no money to make it, it's jsut been photocopied and stapled together....but that's how zines start...and then they grow and grow, and you don't have to fold and staple them yourself! I also wrote articles on the "Boys of Summer Tour" featuring Parkway Drive and Evergreen Terrace, an interview with Frankenbok, the gig guide...and an Alchemist review....although..that might not have made it into the zine.
www.myspace.com/caniscreamzine for more info.
woooooooooooo
