PRESS RELEASE

"286 FEET DESCEND ON MENLO PARK"

Menlo Park, California -- Monday, August 7, 1995.

The 16th annual Mattel Sports World Footbag Championships for Cystic Fibrosis concluded yesterday in Golden Gate Park (San Francisco) after six days of preliminaries here at Menlo Park's Burgess Park and Burgess Gymnasium. Organizers at the Bay Area Footbag Foundation (a non-profit organization promoting the sport of footbag) hosted the event, which attracted 143 players from as far away as Canada and Denmark.

Perhaps one of the most amazing of a raft of new sports originating on the West Coast, footbag has evolved over the last twenty years into a serious athletic discipline from its roots in the casual game played with the original Hacky Sack (tm) brand footbag.

The World Championships provided an opportunity for footbag athletes to engage in competition in several foot-sport disciplines. The main competitive sport around footbag is called footbag net, a game similar to two-person volleyball (or the Asian game Takraw), where players volley a small, vinyl soccer-like ball over a 5-foot-high net, using only their feet, on a grass court configured in the same way as badminton (44' x 20'). Incredible as it may seem, players actually spike, block, and dig the footbag using their feet, much like in volleyball, in aerial maneuvers that defy grafity. The tournament saw the highest calibur of competition yet in singles and doubles footbag net, as well as mixed doubles net.

The artistic form of footbag is has an outlet in the "freestyle" footbag event, in which players choreograph routines to music, in singles or in pairs. These routines are timed, and judged in terms of execution, variety, difficulty, and presentation by a panel of experts. Freestylers exhibit an incredible amount of dexterity with their feet and legs, manipulating a much softer type of footbag in flowing sequences of seemingly impossible tricks. Advanced players frequently perform tricks where they circle the footbag once or twice in the air with one foot and then catch the footbag on one of a variety of edges of either foot -- while spinning, jumping, or performing other tricks simultaneously.

The Bay Area boasts many of the world's top competitors in footbag, and the highest percentage of professional women footbag players in the world. Other top competitors, including 45-time world champion Kenny Shults (Portland, Oregon), four-time world freestyle champion Peter Irish (Virginia Beach, Virginia), and men's overall World Champion Allan Petersen (Copenhagen, Denmark) brought home their titles from this event.

Upwards of 3,000 spectators witnessed the finals day attractions in Golden Gate Park, where a single court surrounded by bleachers filled with spectators spotlighted the final net matches in each of the major divisions (including women's and open singles and doubles, as well as mixed doubles). The scene was very similar to two-person sand volleyball or tennis, with a head official calling the score and observing fouls from a judging chair along the center line at the net, and an announcer adding color commentary and calling the score on the public address system.

A special "Kick-a-Thon" to raise donations for the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation of San Francisco was held on Saturday, with a public check presentation on Sunday at center court. The event was able to raise just over $750 for the charity.

The World Championships was sanctioned by the International Footbag Advisory Board and the World Footbag Association. Sponsors included Mattel Sports (makers of the Hacky Sack® footbag), Castlemaine XXXX Beer, NovaCare Outpatient Rehabiliation, Sipa Sipa Footbag, Whole Foods Market, I Dig Footbag, GTE Mobilnet, Quickick (the original sports drink), Fatsax Footbags, Flying Clipper Footbags, Cole's Footbags, the World Footbag Association, UPTIME Sports, Kinesys Active Sports Care, Teva Sport Sandals, Palo Alto Sport Shop, UPTIME Sports, and Jan's Deli.

For information, contact: Steve Goldberg (President, Bay Area Footbag Foundation), (408) 773-9110, or send e-mail to "worlds@footbag.org". See also: "http://www.footbag.org/worlds/".

The Bay Area Footbag Foundation, Inc., is a California Non-Profit Organization.