My Footbag Education - Part 1
My grandmother bought me my first footbag when I was about 10. It was a sweet two-panel pigskin hacky sack and I remember being excited to get it out of the package. When we got home, I went into the backyard and started trying. I don’t know if you’ve ever kicked with one of those bags, but it’s not particularly easy; they’re a far cry far the nice, stallable bags we use for freestyle today (but that’s the subject of another post).
Sufficed to say that I got discouraged very fast, and promptly lost that footbag, forgetting about the game for a number of years until high school rolled around. I can’t remember the exact time or place when I first started playing again, but once I did, I wouldn’t do much else 
We had “upgraded” to crocheted bags by this time and spent time and effort breaking that fabric in; yes, I used to run them over with my car 
This was somewhere around 1993.
Over the next few years, as most of my friends started to loose interest in hacking (we used to get pretty big circles happening), I steadily grew more addicted, and would spend inordinate amounts of time kicking. And I mean that: we kicked. There were no stalls. I had no idea what a “footbag” was. At one point I thought I must have invented the around the world kick. Together with a couple of friends (Brad McCann and Stacy James), I learned a bunch of hacky sack tricks like “jesters” and walk-overs. Life was good.
One day I was walking around downtown Victoria (I lived out in the ‘burbs at the time) with my cousin Teig. We rounded a corner into a park where a festival was taking place. That’s when I saw him: Jubal Hume was doing real freestyle right in front of my eyes, and I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. My cousin asked: “Is he better than you?”. Ummmm, yeah.
Jubal was fresh back from the 1994 Western Regionals (back when that event was taking place). He had the Lavers, and he was an expert footbag stitcher (made a 32 panel bag without ever having seen one before). I approached him and he gladly showed me some tricks and gave me his card. My life would never be the same.
It took me another two years to transition into taking footbag freestyle seriously enough to attend the 1997 World Footbag Championships. Right after I met him, Jubal moved to Vancouver, but not before I met Jeremy Kumbruch playing with some others in Market Square. Jeremy was a good friend of Jubal’s, so whenever he came into town, we’d meet to play and all of us grew to be very good friends. Jubal moved back to Victoria just before World’s that year, and he encouraged me to come along with the SoleAirPro Team.
That week in Portland is the subject of yet again another post for another time. I think that it was the most inspiring week of my life. Watching Peter and Eric and Tuan and Daryl and Rippin’ . . . indescribable, really. I met Steve Goldberg there, and he encouraged me to check out Footbag Worldwide. I bought my first pair of Lavers, used, from Jeremy on the ferry ride back. That week is when my footbag education really began.
UPDATE: Read Part 2
