Grow Your Circle: Hacky Sack Tips From a Teacher

By Christopher Schooley
Hacky Sacker turned SCH Academy Science Teacher

Nothing has made me happier and prouder of the SCH community this year than the sudden explosion of hacky sack on our campus. It is simply the best. A team sport with no opponent. Few rules, no officials. No need for any special field, court, or equipment beyond a knit ball of beads, beans, or sand. I once played in central Mexico with kids who were using a stitched-up sock full of rice. (Arroz? Si, con arroz!) Hacky sack is all about finding whatever works, wherever, with whomever. 

For those of you wondering what this craze is all about, my opinion is that the appeal lies in the challenge and athleticism, as well as in its communal, cooperative nature rather than its competitive one. Not only that, it is an instant hang. I have traveled the world and hacked with so many different people in dozens of countries on four continents. We may not have spoken the same language with our mouths, but the game prompts communication with eyes, smiles, chests, heads, and, of course, feet. I cannot overstate how often a foot bag has created instant and lasting connections. My wife and I first got to know each other in a hack circle! Twenty-two years later, and we can play with our kids. All it takes to make a friend is one bag, a nod, and a gentle toss. 

ABOVE: Mr. Schooley with an inside left to Mrs. Schooley, Istanbul, Turkey, 2010.

Here are some tips I picked up along the way, along with fundamentals to improve your enjoyment of the game. 

Hacky Sack: Communal Goals

For a circle of three or more,

Complete a hack. A hack is when everyone touches the bag at least once. 

Complete a sack. Like a hack, but now the bag has to go around twice. First the hack, then the sack.

Keep growing your circle. If you and your friends are routinely completing sacks, it means you are ready to grow your circle. Can you complete hacks with 6 people? How about 10?12? Legends tell of circles of a hundred people completing hacks at music festivals and other such gatherings. We don’t need to be that ambitious, but crucially, your growth will and should include players with different and perhaps less experience than you. Unlike any other team sport, playing with a few newbies actually makes the whole group better. Why? Because it’s harder. Usually, a newbie can’t control where they are kicking it, if they even can. GOOD. Your instincts and reflexes are sharper when you don’t know and can’t predict what’s about to happen. Hacky sack is nothing if not a continuous series of improvisations. Again, whatever works. Your ability to react and save a rally with some quick reflexes is way better than hitting a highlight reel trick shot you have been rehearsing for weeks. Those are cool too, but not nearly as cool as making new friends while making everyone better.

Hacky Sack: Individual Goals 

Here is a rough guide to the game to grow your own personal skill. You may already have a mix of these skills, but find roughly what you want to work on next. 

Level 1. Make contact. Easier said than done at the beginning. Get over that sticky foot feeling and just start swinging. And of course, no hands or arms. This isn’t hot potato. If you find yourself reaching for the bag with your hands, transmit that feeling to your foot. It’ll catch on quick. All other parts of the body are good too. 

Level 2. Hit it up, but not too high. Shoulder to just above head high is the right balance between having enough time to react and moving too fast on the way down to keep it under control.

Level 3. Hit it to yourself, then hit it again. When you start making routine contact, your first instinct is to send it somewhere else. It’s a natural reaction. You want to keep it alive, but don’t want to be the cause of the end of a hack attempt. But what’s tough with single touches is that if everyone is doing it, things get very frantic very quickly. Pretty soon, everyone is swatting at it like a floppy moth around a campfire. Don’t be afraid of the sack. Make it your friend. The technique of playing it to yourself is to pop it up (more on that below), and then quickly put the foot back down as the sack rises to reload for your next kick. Rarely will a double tap with the same foot work well without this reload. Putting your foot down right away after a hit is key to both preparing for the next kick, but more importantly, it allows you to find your balance, to relieve some pressure, to pivot, and/or to shift your weight so that you have the option to engage with the other foot depending on where the sack is headed. 

Level 4. Hack Off. Yes, the terminology is a little crude, but hey, it works! Once you’ve got the timing of your first and second strikes down, you are ready to rent the bag for a bit. Taking possession of the hack seems a little selfish at first as your friends stand and watch, but this is all part of the game. Hacking off is perfectly allowed and in fact highly encouraged, for a couple of reasons. First of all, it is time for each player to develop their skills, showcase their game, try new tricks, and add their own unique flair to the circle. But most importantly, a quality hack off settles the game down and gives the rest of the circle time to lock back in. This is especially important if things have gotten or tend to get frantic.

Level 5. Make a decent pass. Now that you’ve hacked off, it’s time to give someone else a turn! This step is easier said than done. Once you make friends with the hack, you may find yourself having trouble parting with it. You’ve found a sweet touch that keeps the bag under your control. Trouble is, it has become your only instinct. You may have already experienced the following: you get into a groove of popping it up in the same exact spot over and over. All of a sudden, hacky sack seems so easy. You could go on forever. It’s intoxicating how simple it is to just repeat the same motion indefinitely. But you come to realize that this is all you can do. You can’t shake it. Your friends have been patiently waiting, but now they are hungry. And worst of all, you’re getting tired. In desperation, you hit it hard. It flies off in a random direction where only a clutch save could possibly keep it alive!... I call this scenario the sacktorbeam. If you are like me, you may get the feeling at some point that there is a magnetic attraction between your foot and the sack that you can’t easily break. Snagging the sack is its own thing; hitting it to yourself is another. Releasing it well is one more. And here I’d like to talk a little bit about the shape of our feet or shoes and what works for me.

I see a lot of players using their toes, especially our soccer players. It’s a great technique because, as long as you can put enough on it, you can get it nice and high. The problem with toe kicks is, just like in soccer, your control of direction rests on a fairly fine point right at the end of your foot. A few millimeters one way or the other is the difference between kicking it up, right, left, or flat. And unlike a soccer ball, the sack is not symmetric. Because the beads shift around inside, it’s an amorphous blob, more like a droplet than a ball: even two touches on the same spot with the same force won’t always produce the same result. 

I also want to say here that I'm very impressed by the skills of some of our barefoot hackers. I learned to play in shoes, playing as I often did on hikes or in urban areas not conducive to bare feet, and I will always need them. Barefooters are purists, and if you become a barefoot sack artist, you will never have the problem that I have often experienced of not having the right pair on. 

All this to get to what I find works best for both height and precision: the inside edge of a soled sneaker.
 

ABOVE: SCH students play hacky sack at lunchtime.