The Future of Footbag Freestyle, By Honza Weber

Recently I watched couple sideline videos from various years World championships and in the background I was hearing all the names of great players from the past being read in their pools and it forced me to think about the past of the sport and of course its future. Let`s be honest because there is not many of us left here in freestyle. That is also why I mentioned the word “freestyle” in the title of this article. I have to diversify between freestyle and net because, let`s be honest again, these sports do not have much in common except all the freestylers switching to net when they grow up, which leads us to the first downfall of freestyle, the age. When you are young enough, it is very easy to be obsessed with freestyle because you can improve quite fast, but when you get older, not only that it is hard to keep up with the young players, you also fight with the flexibility of your body and the fun can be gone with the same speed it appeared.

The other reason for footbag freestyle breakdown is other freestyle category, freestyle football. This very young sport, which gained attention of thousands of people around the World (including our fellow bloke Vasek) in the beginning of the new millenium, managed to overgrow footbag in a small fragment of time that footbag had existed. When I first entered the freestyle football community, the players kept talking about “freestyle”, not “freestyle football”, just “freestyle”, which I could not understand. I was asking myself “Are they really that cocky to think they can overcome the meaning of the word and implement it only to their sport? What about freestyle… jet ski , bmx and so on?” When I did realise how widespread has the sport and the community become in such a short time, I start to understand.

Not only has freestyle football gained players, but also media attention because people can simply see what is going on, which is sometimes very hard with footbag. Visibility of footbag has always been a problem. Even though the media wanted to make some reports on footbag, it was just impossible with the small footbags the players are allowed to use. There is a solution now though, football and all the freestylers who can handle it.

The current freestyle footbag community has one big problem and that is the lack of new players. Great amount of older players has quit the sport, but there is nobody to compensate the losses. The 12th annual Todexon tournament just happened here in Prague last week and there was 7 registered players for the event. Yes, 7 players, that is ridiculous! I remember in 2003, there were over 80! We had to have 3 rounds and we had to start with the routines at 10AM to be able to make the finals on time at 8PM. That was incredible! Milan told me how angry he was when he saw just those 7 registered players and I understood. He worked really hard for many years to become the top player and now he has no competition and it seems as a waste of time for him and wanting him to quit the sport as well as all the others before him.

Steve Goldberg also visited Prague last week for 13th time in his life and I still remember what he told me during Todexon, “There is no passion for the sport anymore” and I again had to agree. It seems just like a duty for the players to come to tournaments and compete. To compete is also harder than ever before, freestyle has reached an incredible difficulty level and there is basically no bad or intermediate player competing these days and therefore it is very easy to finish lets say 10th out of 10 competitors.

“It looks to me like our history, running on repeat, over and over” are words from the latest song of my favorite music band “Looptroop Rockers”, but these words have also the same meaning as a story about history of frisbee freestyle Dexter told me some time ago. The sport almost died during the 90s, but the community managed to survive and is even evolving these days. I think footbag is also really close to “extinction” these days and it is really just up to us to save it because nobody else will or can help. One way could be to force the players to compete with big bright visible bags and make the sport more suitable for media, which could afterwards attract sponsors and bring some money and more people. I know it is probably not the best compromising solution, but in my opinion it is worth trying. I still remember when I saw Jorden using such bags for his routine and I thought he was crazy, but now it seems like a good idea. I just hope people like Queency, Steve, Red, Daryl and Dale will not give up that easily and together we manage to ensure there will still be any footbag freestyle players and tournaments when our kids ask us “What is this?” and they will be holding a beautiful 32 panel bag in their hands.

Honza Weber

Name: Derrick Fogle
Location: Columbia MO
Site: http://h4x354x0r.com
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I kicked for over 3 hours today. w00t! Happy St. Patty’s Day!

Amazingly enough, I only filmed 5 rallies: 3 duds, and 2 like this. It was an awesome session, even with the chaos from the Frat boys and their dunking tank. There was coffee earlier, violently green drinking cups later, and the dunk tank crew supplied the tunes! Got new batteries for the boom box, then didn’t even need them.

I repaired Prissy, but not quite well enough; there’s still one spot where beads are still leaking. But, I brought an old net bag this time, and sure enough, the power hacker dude showed up at the end. So, I totally saved my freestyle bags this time. I even gave the guy the old net bag when I left.

My Speaker Circle presence so far has been to go long on rallies, but lame on difficulty and variety. Sometimes it seems like this old body needs to go lame on difficulty sometimes. I’ve been flogging (footbag blogging) for 2-1/2 years now, starting at 45. I’ll be hitting 30 years of footbag at the start of July, and 48 years of age at the end of August.

If there’s anything I can say is an age-related degeneration, I’ll have to spend half the time talking about general aches and pains, and the other half about the loss of motion range tolerance. For someone that used to do a lot of jumping stuff, I can barely get off the ground now. Landings often seem stiff and painful.

But still, for a guy my age…

I’m in great fucking shape. And I think I owe a lot of that to footbag. Just sayin’…

3:00/16:00 – Thanks for tuning in!

Syndicated with permission from http://www.danednie.com/

Merry Xmas Everyone!!
This was such such such an unbelievable year in Footbag for me.

January – Featured on a nation-wide Subway commercial and voted the Education Director at the International Footbag Players Association

February to June – Lived in the Czech Republic learning Czech with the Footbaggers there, learning how to play doubles with Ales Zelinka Tomas Tucek and Martin! I also trained singles with Milan Benda and Vasek who were just so inspiring. Not only is Footbag a sport of great beauty, but the coordination and precision these two had took my understanding of the intrinsic beauty of the human form to a new level.

Ales Zelinka and Dan Ednie doing Doubles at the World Championships

Dan Ednie and Ales Zelinka at Worlds

July – I came 13th in Singles Freestyle, ran a Certified Instructors course for about 50 future Footbag teachers, judged the singles freestyle finals and had The Vasek Klouda Manual: How to Play Footbag published with Vasek.

Dan Ednie doing Singles at Worlds '09

August to December: Taught close to 2000 students at twelve different schools and spoke at four events about my personal journey in Footbag. I’ve also been invited to speak more and teach more at lots of new schools and events in 2010 and I just totally love it.

I am inching closer to my goal of teaching 10,000 students personally. I’m just a tick underneath 9,000. I’ll be graduating from my BA at Melbourne University half way through next year, and I don’t know if I will be in Australia in the second half, but any school that would like to have me come along to teach them Footbag, please email me early next year, I would love to come.

I am so so blessed to have met all of the teachers, students and Footbaggers I have this year in Australia and Europe. Footbag is a great game, yes, but now that I’ve played for over ten years, the value for me isn’t really in playing. The opportunities , the people, the travel, the teaching and the conversations that make the Footbag community what it is have a couple of times this year moved me to tears. Footbag has been the biggest thing to ever happen to me.

Dan Ednie

Syndicated with permission from http://www.danednie.com/

Dan Ednie Pic

When you want to do hard tricks, you can put them all together in a grouping, or have them just after you’ve taken a break. For example, Takumi’s world’s routine.

http://www.footbag.org/gallery/show/12545

Note: see the pixie swirl and the final ripstein–he really has a break, gets ready, then he has every chance of completing the trick. He makes it as easy as possible to succeed. All the other hard tricks are in one section towards the start. But most of them are forgotten by the end, especially because there was no climax in the music when he did them.

For a good example of hitting hard tricks during the climax, and making them more memorable, see Vasek semi-final 2006.

http://www.footbag.org/gallery/show/10059

To see how to set up and have preparation for tricks, see my semi-final world’s routine:

http://www.footbag.org/gallery/show/10059

I am playing to the music with each set up trick, but it is actually a rest if you can find music that really helps you get ready for those big tricks, then it will be much easier. Also, see in the semi-final routine that I only play to the music right at the start and right at the end.

In the middle, the music plays at about the same speed at the whole time, but you don’t realize because your first and last impressions are that I’m really organized. It’s so easy to tell that I’m playing to the music. Don’t be too subtle, because if people can’t tell, it doesn’t help you. You really want people to be able to tell that you’ve practiced. Have a look at Lon Smith in the semi-finals of
Worlds 2007:

http://www.footbag.org/gallery/show/10291

He’s really entertaining, hits hard tricks, but it was so disorganized and obvious that he never practiced it that it scored badly and he was unlucky not to make finals, despite his amazing skill level.

Use breaks to help you. See my qualifying routine:

http://www.footbag.org/gallery/show/12543

From x to x after the p.s whirl, I am resting. I do juggling then very slowly have one bag on each foot and atw’s, then I do kicks and knee bumps. That was all a break for me because I was dying by that point, and I knew to put that rest there because in practice I was always tired at that point. So I wrote a break into the routine.

Syndicated with permission from http://www.danednie.com/

This was truly epic, but what did it mean?

You will notice watching it that the first minute at least is almost without any risk. The majority of the tricks are butterflies and the overwhelming emotion is that the run hasn’t started. That the tricks in the beginning are so simple actually tells us that this will be an extremely long run. It runs for almost three minutes. This is not a long time for Vasek. He is not really playing for the tricks, only the swifter and two vortexes even suggest that he is hitting tricks because he likes them. He is not playing for tricks, he is playing for contacts.

For those not at worlds, you might not know that Vasek almost never plays in the seven days, in fact he only came on tuesday afternoon or wednesday morning from memory.

It is suggested that the best outcome from the invention of circle is that it forced Vasek to play for the cameras. If you look back at footage from Worlds 07, with a couple of exceptions, the only footage available is from the circle contest. He took about five- ten runs in the same area, but the people that have video from that haven’t really posted it in many places. The Monday following worlds 07 he actually shredded at Terra Verde for over two hours hitting unbeleivable combos like attempted gauntlet> nemesis to some thing else which he dropped.

Because Vasek’s routines generally circle around the same tricks and combinations, the first run of his circle is always something which is highly anticipated. But the first run in the circle finals is the run that he chooses to make his point to everyone watching. Vasek tried with this run to prove that he is in a league of his own and that he is really the only player in the circle. Milan Benda showed us though that there is, in the absence of Jorden Moir, an intermediate between Vasek and the rest. Milan annihilated the circle final with almost all runs over 40 contacts even more convincingly than Vasek won Worlds circle. If anyone has footage of this, let me know.

During this time the other three had to start concentrating on staying warm, to stand waiting for four minutes or longer for your try is too long. Say you drop three moves in, its as though you haven’t played, the bag goes to Vasek, then Milan and then you need to construct a run. The intimidation factor for me was too cruel in this competition. While it has established a record length run in circle which might not be broken for a year or so, I didn’t really rejoice in this statement. It seemed as though it was a way of making it harder for the other players to stay warm, like a plan. What are your thoughts?

Thanks

Dan

Syndicated with permission from http://www.danednie.com/

Dan Ednie Pic

The Vasek Klouda Manual: How to Play Footbag is a 90+ page eBook written for everyone from beginners to advanced players. In the five months I spent in the Czech Republic I had access to the inner world of now seven-time world champion Vasek Klouda. In many ways this text is the product of those discussion, my questions and Vasek’s feelings toward footbag as a sport and a lifestyle.

The book is available for download for US$5 with half of all proceeds going to the IFPA to help fund the future of Footbag worldwide. The text covers three core topics: How to train footbag, The psychology of footbag, and the exact trick tips that will help you to master ever set and every downtime component.

You can read the three page biography of Vasek if you schroll down on this blog and I will be releasing exerpts there once a week.

The place to download it is at
http://www.footbag.cz/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=214&Itemid=70
Or if that link doesn’t work then go to
www.footbag.cz and click on the second news item.

Thank you