Freedom Footbags

Photograph by Francis DeLapena

From the Boise Weekly Newspaper…

MAY 31, 2006

The Church of Footbag
Leave your tongue at the door

Let’s get a few things straight. All Hacky Sacks are footbags, however, not all footbags are Hacky Sacks. Much like the Kleenex has over-taken the word “tissue,” (or if you’re English, the vacuum cleaner has been forever replaced with “Hoover” in your vocabulary), Hacky Sack is a brand name. And it is now made in a geographic locale where “minimum wage” is not commonly used terminology.

And let it also be declared that Hacky — er, footbags are not just for those with Grateful Dead teddy bears hanging from their rearview mirrors. Footbag can be an incredibly physical sport.

Sunny Freeman-Genz explains all this to me as she drives me out to footbag central — that is, her house in Nampa. Two teenage boys sit in the back seat. One leans forward intermittently to correct his mother in that teenage know-it-all way. Freeman-Genz is the matriarch of the Freedom Footbag family. She met Daryl Genz, a.k.a. “Genzu Blades,” at her first-ever footbag tournament. She says, “Every circle I’d be in, I’d look up and he’d be in the same one … Coincidence?” The couple moved to Nampa from Colorado, where Daryl Genz was a structural engineer. He followed his dream and now his life really is his passion: Genz makes, sells, plays, eats and breathes footbag.

The house seems to be a fairly normal…

BY JESSICA OLIEN

Read the full article here.

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