Great Advice
I haven’t been reading the forums much these days, but yesterday’s post about the Footbag Comparison Chart had me posting on modified, and I got to reading a few threads. I stumbled across this one on Footbag Worldwide. Colin Kennedy is a really intelligent person, who always posts in a helpful, thoughtful manner (and his grammar is impeccable 
). In the newbie forum, the following was posted at the end of this thread:
Matt Heton (Greenfootbagger)
Joined: 14 Mar 2007
Posts: 79
Location: Mesquite, TX, USA
Posted: Sun Mar 18, 2007 11:02 pm
How do i convince my mom to get me a pair of rod lavers if i already have 2 decent pairs of tennis shoes?
Colin Kennedy (ckennedy)
Joined: 20 Sep 2003
Posts: 556
Location: St. John’s, NL, Canada
Posted: Mon Mar 19, 2007 2:27 am
Hold your breath until she agrees or you pass out. Or…For someone who doesn’t know about freestyle footbag, your mom’s position is understandable. Why would you need a third pair of sneakers? You need to convince your mom that Lavers are a piece of sporting equipment and not just clothing. I’m sure she’d understand that you need a glove to play baseball, no matter how many winter gloves you own. (bad example in Texas, now that I think of it)
What you can do to show her this is to take the game seriously yourself. Put real time into it and improve. Tell her about it, about your own progress and frustration. Most parents are smart enough to encourage activity that has their kids coming inside covered in sweat and smiling from ear to ear because of some recent success. Footbag rewards determination and hard work better than anything else I’ve ever done, and so teaches its players to approach the rest of their lives similarly. We’ve all heard that practice makes perfect, but now I know it for myself and live it in everything I care about.
Got a little dramatic there, but I really do mean it. Invest yourself seriously in the game, and your mom will come around. Be patient. Have your mom look at some videos of top players, to see what you’re learning. Have her read this post.
