I’ve been a footbag kicker since I saw my first stalls in high school. Some older kids played legit footbag, or freestyle as it’s commonly referred to, and I was enamored on my first day of high school when I saw them playing their unique style at lunch. This wasn’t like anything I had seen before, though I had been hacking for quite some time very enthusiastically for just about all of junior high and middle school up until then. I quickly befriended them, and started trying to learn my first stall. It took me all of a day to finally get it consistently.
Conveniently, I was lucky enough to grow up during the time that the internet and a PC became a household item for most families, around 2000. I searched and YouTube’d my way to videos of professional footbag players from around the world, joined the IFPA, carried a sand-filled bag everywhere I went, and even got some of my local friends to start playing with me. We learned tricks from each other and advanced our tiny segment of the sport in our corner of the world.
Soon after high school I moved to the San Francisco Bay Area to pursue whatever I may find there 🙂 This proved to be a fantastic decision, helping to blossom my career in social media marketing as well as providing the fortune of meeting my lovely wife. I did not, however, meet any local footbag players. I was busy with the hustle and bustle of the city, and would mostly just run around Lake Merritt when I got the chance and shred in a few key places on my own. I did meet some casual kickers, but nothing permanent.
During that time I was fortunate enough to work with Dan Ednie on editing the footbag manual he an Vasek Klouda (wiki) c0-wrote together. We also did a short social media run as well, promoting the manual for sale in PDF form. We’re very close now to re-releasing the manual as a proper ebook. Stay tuned for more details about that!
The Twitter community wasn’t primed for the footbag sport at that time, with only a few key players online and some barely active community pages. Around then I put together some community profiles which are still in use today. They are @PlayFootbag and @FootbagBot.
@PlayFootbag is mostly famous for automatically tweeting new footbag videos posted to YouTube. It’s a hub for new footbag content and updates periodically throughout the day. I usually find really cool videos from other countries posted there; it’s pretty cool to see people shredding in Chile.
@FootbagBot is a ROBOT! Not really, but it runs on an algorithm that allows it to automatically retweet any tweet with the hashtag #Footbag. It’s meant to serve as a community hub for people in the footbag community to follow in case they miss a tweet they would have wanted to see, like somebody in there area calling out to local players that isn’t in their friends list. Most notably, I’ve been running the social media efforts at Flying Clipper for the past two years as well, which has been really fun.
I’ve been so happy to be able to participate in the growth of this sport in my own unique way. I feel like social media is the place to be these days, and it’s great to help some companies and the community overall in engaging with each other through social media. I definitely can say I love my job 🙂
World Footbag has a long history of working with schools to promote the sport of Footbag.
While we’ve scaled back our direct efforts in recent years, that doesn’t mean we won’t continue to support schools and students in the various ways we find along our journey here at World Footbag. Recently we were approached by a senior from Independence, OR about sponsoring his senior project. We were delighted to receive the request, and even more delighted when we got back photos and a story about how our bags were put to use for this student’s project!
Here is Druw’s story:
My name is Druw Martinez I live in Independence, Oregon. I attend Central High School, as a graduation requirement every senior at Central must complete and pass a senior project. My senior project was Dr. Seuss Day at Henry Hill Elementary School.
I had two partners in this project Brittney and Gloria. My main focus on the project was fundraising all the money needed for the supplies, food, books and whatever other materials we may need to make a grand Dr. Seuss Day for not the only the students of Henry Hill Elementary School, but also the whole community. I recently got into footbags and it quickly grew more popular with my friends and other people at my high school. We play during passing periods, lunch, after school, and during our no classes.
During the fundraising for my project I thought it would be awesome if I could somehow get people to start playing with footbags while incorporating it into my project. World Footbag made that possible. I wrote them a letter explaining my project and what I was doing. I asked if they could make any kind of donation to my cause. To my luck they did. I sold the footbags that were so generously donated by World Footbag, not only did I raise money for my project, but I was able to share my love for footbags with other people.
The money I raised from selling the footbags all went to buy books so every child that came to Dr. Seuss Day during all the nighttime activities and dinner we provided would receive a free book. Sadly we couldn’t get all Dr. Seuss books to give away. We did get quite a few though. The students and families were ecstatic about this simple gift. Once again thank you World Footbag for being a part of my senior project.
