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As of May 26, the Bay Port High School baseball team in Green Bay, Wis., was 21-0 at home, crowned the Fox River Classic Conference champion and likely on its way to the state tournament. While certainly talented, the Pirates’ secret ingredient might be … hacky sack.
That’s right: Bay Port’s favorite team activity is playing a game their parents probably played as kids, and it’s paying off in ways nobody could have expected.
“Honestly, it’s probably playing hacky sack together,” sophomore Eli Hart told NBC26.com when asked about team chemistry. “It’s something we love to do together. It’s how we spend time with each other, and our bond has grown.”
“I brought a sack to practice one day and it just kind of caught on,” added senior Griffin Clusman. “All the guys do it now and they love it.”
They’re not the only ones. Across the country, the game officially called “footbag” but generically referred to as “hacky sack” — derived from the brand name of a popular footbag — consists of two or more players standing in a circle and using feet, knees, elbows, chest and other parts to keep a small, round bean- or sand-filled bag about the size of a golf ball from touching the ground. No hands or arms allowed.
“People started bringing hacky sacks from their home, and a bunch of different friend groups play,” Charlie Desmond, a student at all-boys La Salle College High School in Wyndmoor, Pa., told CBSNews.com in May. “It’s like all over the school.”
And it’s also keeping kids off their phones and making them interact with each other. Imagine that!
“Probably one of the more controversial topics is controlling cellphone use, but now they’re just being with each other. So, in some ways, the problem has really solved itself with the intervention of the sport,” Brother James Butler, La Salle College High’s principal, told CBSNews.com. “For as long as it lasts as a fad, I’m delighted. When the kids ask me if I want to sack, I always say I’m a retired pass master. That’s because when I first started teaching in ’82 or ’83, it was a big thing for a while. I remember it well.”
So does Sondra Primeaux, a 56-year-old teacher at McCallum High School in Austin, Texas, where “students circle up with a hacky sack during lunchtime, or get in a few kicks in the hallways after class,” according to The New York Times.
“One of the boys was like, ‘Where can I get one?’” she said. “I said, ‘1992.’”
“Young customers at Play It Again Sports in Concord, Calif., have been clearing the shelves of suede-paneled SandMasters ($10) and multicolored Boota bags ($6) for at least a month, said Billy Ball, 46, a sales associate,” The Times reports. “‘I’m serious, we get 15 calls a day about hacky sacks,’ he said.”
Why the renewed craze for something so simple? Some kids attribute it to a surge of hacky sack videos flooding TikTok and other social media platforms in recent months; TikTok reported a 330% increase in “hackysack’” hashtags in one week alone this spring. But adults think something deeper is at play here.
“It’s a shared experience,” Greyson Herdman, a co-owner of World Footbag, which manufactures footbags and operates a museum about the history of the sport, told The Times. “I’m not trying to beat you in a game, we’re playing together.”
Although various versions of footbag have been played for decades, the current incarnation in North America can be traced to two Oregon men — John Stallberger Jr. and the late Mike Marshall — who are credited with creating the game in Marshall’s Oregon City basement.
“Actually that’s what made us good, because we played in a basement where the ceiling was low and we had to learn how to control the footbag,” Stalberger told The Oregonian years ago. “We would more or less dream about how we were going to make this sport big.”
This month, Oregon once again will be the center of the hacky sack universe when Willamette Park in West Linn, Ore., hosts the US Open Footbag Tournament on June 13-14. Featuring numerous categories in three main events — Net, Freestyle and Non-Registered Sideline Events — the competition will take place just miles from Oregon City.
“Expect over 50 competitive players from across the U.S. and Canada, many of whom are training for the 45th World Footbag Championships in Tsukuba City, Japan, ensuring truly world-class play,” proclaims a page on Travel Portland’s website dedicated to the event. “Whether you’re a seasoned competitor or a curious newcomer, there’s something for everyone: watch elite Freestyle and Net competition, or jump in yourself for casual circle kicking, footbag 4-square and consecutive kicking face-offs.”
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