My Footbag Education – Part 2

OK, so where was I? Oh yeah: The 1997 World Footbag Championships.

By this point, my skater-friends were starting to bug me about how much time I was spending playing hack. As my game was progressing, I had started wearing shorter shorts to accommodate the harder moves. I was always independent and placed function before fashion; I would quip back to 80s “nug-hugger” jokes by pointing out that if short shorts helped make ollying down stairs any easier, that they would all be teasing the kids who wore baggy shorts.

After I came back from world’s that year, my transition was complete and I was wearing lavers and short-shorts full time

The Next Level

While Jubal had gone to a tournament or two, he didn’t have the full body of footbag knowledge that was out there. We routinely confused move concepts and ADD values and, essentially, played in isolation, not knowing much else of the outside footbag world. Even at Worlds, we weren’t really very social, and so didn’t pick up much of the lingo. This was both a good thing and a bad thing. It was good because it really helped us to develop and maintain different styles. It was bad because we were limited by our own imaginations when there was a lot more out there to be studied.

I would say that despite everything that both Jubal and Jeremy did for me as friends and footbag mentors, it was, as it was and continues to be for so many, Steve Goldberg who really put me in touch with footbag. He was very approachable at Worlds and even kicked with us a few times. It was here that he told me about his website: Footbag Worldwide.

Footbag on the Intarweb

The Moves List

I printed the freestyle moves list on footbag.org several times. I put it in my backpack and studied it wherever I went. I gave it away to interested people and printed more. There were so many footbag tricks listed, but I knew, because of Ben Job’s freestyle notation system that these were only the beginnings, a smattering of what was possible.

Tutorials

They’re short and to the point. The tutorials that Steve wrote on Job’s Notation, Paradox, ADD concepts etc, when combined with the moves list, and discussion can allow people to visualize footbag to a standard, enabling them to communicate moves and ideas for moves in standard language. I’m continually surprised at the number of new players who go so far as to buy lavers without ever having read any of this material. Studying that stuff is one of the most important things you can for your game.

Freestyle at Footbag dot Org

I started participating in the freestyle [at] footbag [dot] org mailing list pretty much right after that fateful ’97 Worlds. I promptly made an ass of myself, trying to assert myself as a serious young player who lacked the experience to know that everything I thought I knew about the mechanics of footbag was pretty much wrong. I bragged a bunch and got into flame wars. I made some great friends and Steve ended up mentoring me in my newly chosen career of web development.

After moderating the list for about a year, freestyle at footbag dot org gave way to the forum. I set up the very first forums (including the net one!) there, and racked up several hundred posts before my interest in “chatting” about freestyle started to wane. At this point, I’m only a cursory observer and occasional participant in those forums. But I was there, there were an integral part of my footbag life, and helped me to develop a thorough understanding of freestyle mechanics (although I doubt that more every day ).

Alllll of that being said, typing and reading can only get you so far.

The Videos

I spent hours upon hours sitting in the University of Victoria’s computer lab, surfing the web under my girlfriend’s student ID (I’ve never attended UVic), downloading ’96 Tam-Tam Jam videos and World’s 97 videos (Back in 1998, it took up to an hour for a 3MB video to download on those connections, but was it ever worth the wait!). I can vividly remember that feeling, watching Peter Irish do blurry whirl > paradox torque > blurry whirl . . . MAN. Stepping set anything out of paradox torque just seemed . . . surreal. I watching it frame-by-frame, backwards and forwards.

There is no measuring what those videos did for my game. Without those videos, I can say it likely that I would not be sitting here typing this post now. I was into footbag, sure. But seeing is truly believing, and without that constant stimulation, I think my game would have plateaued and never gone beyond the occasional torque in a not-even tilt-less world.

Watching Myself

Just as only talking and reading about footbag will only get you so far, so will only watching videos of other people. In 2000 I spent some of my food money for the month on a second-hand video camera. I carried that thing everywhere with my in my backpack. There was a period between about 2000-2002 where I recorded at least half of the sessions I played. The angles sucked and never changed, but I wasn’t really filming for anyone but myself. As often as possible, I would head directly home from a session, rewinding the tape as I went (if the batteries weren’t dead already), plug the thing into my computer, capture any decent runs I had, and analyze them to death. Some might say my posture and style are sloppy now . . . well, I have about 100 hours of video in a box somewhere that shows how much I’ve progressed

Sharing Progress

Jubal went to the prestigious Vancouver Film School. He had some gear. I used it a lot. His Miro DC30 Analogue capture card was *awesome*. I could seriously geek out about this piece of computer hardware here, but I’ll digress and just say that it made video editing fun.

So, I’ve got all of this footage already in digital form, sitting in a time line. So what do I do? I start exporting for the web so that I post it up the list and brag! I could go into all sorts of detail about my technical progress in developing websites to present my videos, but again I’ll digress and just say that making and sharing footbag videos is the primary reason why I have the career that I do today. Most importantly though, putting your footbag skills on video is one of the best ways to learn how to shred. Watch other people play too, but I’m sure players like David Clavens and Jorden Moir can attest to the power of watching yourself play, no matter how sycophantic that may sound.

The Conclusion (finally!)

What is all this rambling saying? Don’t Just Play. It’s true of anything that you want to get good at. Eat, sleep, breathe, and eat it. Learn the boring notation and try to write out the runs you did today or that you want to do tomorrow; write out other people’s run from videos. Participate in the forums. GO TO TOURNAMENTS! (says me…)

Video continues to re-invent footbag education on the web. YouTube is exposing so many more thousands of people to serious freestyle, and bandwidth is becoming cheap enough for us to download entire feature length freestyle movies over-night. A couple of years ago now, Daryl and company and I had an iShred with Scott Davidson; in other words, we have one of the very first “virtual shreds” with Scott in Chicago, and us in Nampa, ID. We faced the computer’s camera out towards the circle, and he’d take his proper turn when the bag got around to him. This experience is fast become realistic for more and more people, and I see this as very much apart of the future of footbag freestyle.

So, I’ll spare you the rest of poorly attempted inspirational diatribe and just offer up these words to you as my experience of my education in footbag. Thanks for reading.