By Isabella Ying
During lunch one day, I was basking in the sun’s warmth on a bench in William’s Plaza with a friend. All of a sudden, a spherical, knit bag filled with some sort of pellets came flying at us, and a group of junior and senior boys, arranged in a cult-like circle, were all staring straight at us — or rather, the hacky sack that landed next to us on the ground.
Like throwing a bone to a dog, I tossed it back to them. Their faces suddenly relaxed, their circle closed back up, and the hacky sack began flying through the air again, bouncing from On Cloud to New Balance shoes.
As it has for most Lovett students and faculty, the sudden arrival of these joy-bringing balls, no more than two-and-a-half inches in diameter, is an utterly perplexing phenomenon. Even the groups that do engage in the activity struggle to explain it.
Bates Castellaw tried his best to articulate it after Mr. Newman tracked him down in his AP Physics class. About two months ago, according to Bates, he and his friend and lacrosse teammate Copeland Stukes were at lacrosse practice. “We picked up a lacrosse ball and we literally just kind of started kicking it,” Bates said. I hope that’s less painful than it sounds. From there, Copeland and another teammate, Hopkins David, ventured to High Country Outfitters to purchase Lovett’s patient zero hacky sack.
Then, “we kept buying new ones, and eventually it grew throughout the school and on the internet.” As for the skyrocketing popularity, Bates does not believe that it could have happened more than a month ago. Ultimately, “for why it got big in the school, I have no clue,” he said. He supposes “people find the appeal of kicking a little hacky sack around.”
From the famously reliable source of information called Instagram, Bates observed that “it’s been a popular thing since the early 2010s,” and now “that culture’s just coming back.”
With hacky sack having originated in 1972, he’s seen how “on the internet, you can tell that people are coming back out of the shadows.” (One of the reasons Mr. Newman was so eager to talk with Bates is that he hadn’t really thought about hacky sack since he himself played it in junior high school back in the eighties, and was shocked to see its sudden reemergence here on the Riverbank.)
Now, to an outsider, it appears as though the inner workings of a sack circle are akin to an otherworldly ritual (which may be why Bates told me he has “met people that refuse to try it because they just don’t understand the point of it”). So, he laid out his mindset during rallies, which he usually participates in before or after lacrosse practice.
Occasionally, at hang-outs, he’ll also join sack circles — ideally with four people, to optimize the amount of touches per person, and minimize the margin for error. Who knew hacky sack was such a technical activity?
Speaking of “tech,” that is actually hacky sack terminology. When someone does a cool move, they should expect praise along the lines of “that’s tech.” In fact, when I came back from school one day, my brother recounted how his entire English class played hacky sack, including Mr. Newman. “Mr. Newman is tech-y,” my brother told me.
Anyway, I digress. Returning to the mechanics of hacky sack: “Sometimes you decide, all right, let’s just get to 15 here,” Bates said. But also, “other times you try to move around and try to plan these moves.” When this happens, the rallies are bound to be shorter. In general, hacky sack is improvisational: “no one’s good enough to be able to know exactly what they want to do,” he said.
When someone kicks the bag out of the circle, that is called a field goal, Bates said. When one makes a field goal during hacky sack, it is comparable to an airball in basketball, which is to say, a shameful thing to do. What’s worse, however, is if someone unintentionally uses their hand during a rally. Bates said that such activities ruin the moment.
Altogether, playing hacky sack is about more than just kicking a bead-filled bag around. For one, “it’s a really good social thing because you can just hop in there and be like, ‘all right, I’m in here now.’” In addition, “we’ve bonded more over the fact that we all have this skill now and that we can all do it outside of practice.”
Eventually, the topic of Lovett’s second-place GHSA Sack ranking came up. Bates attributed Lovett’s recognition to the success of their Instagram account, @lovett_sack. On their account, “your own moves can contribute to other people’s moves, and then it all comes in to make these cool videos.”
He described some of the moves that earned Lovett his prestigious hacky-sack silver ranking. The internet likes to see when “you throw it in the air, and you can land it on your back and rest it there” as well as “doing a behind-the-leg kick,” Bates said.
Bates, who humbly claimed not to be a particularly skilled hacky sacker, said that the coolest trick he can do with a hacky sack is a stall. Explanation followed Mr. Newman’s confused expression: a stall is when someone rests the bag on their foot.
As for individual rankings, the @lovett_sack account reached out to the GHSA Sack (fake GHSA) account and “we promoted Alex Diffley as our number one hacky sacker, so he’s apparently a four-star now.” Bates is happy for his friend, but he thinks hacky-sack honors are something he can live without.
At the end of the day, like most things, “I think it’ll eventually end,” Bates said. “But I think it definitely has a stronger base than most things have had in a long time.”
