Hacky sacks (yes, hacky sacks) are mega popular at Ottawa high schools again

Hacky sack is all the rage in high schools right now, including for these Glebe Collegiate Institute students. L to R: Isaac Arsenault, Henry Chernoff and Luke-Alexander Forbes. Photo by JEAN LEVAC /POSTMEDIA

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The bell rings to end the school day at 3 p.m. and one student is rushing down the front step of Glebe Collegiate Institute, exclaiming that he can’t wait to sack with his friends.

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What he’s excited to do, exactly, is stand in a circle, kick a small fabric bag around, and try not to let it hit the ground. The activity will look very familiar to Gen Xers thinking back on their youth, but for those wondering: the hacky sack is the hottest toy on the market — again.

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“It brings the community together,” said Thomas Storey, a Grade 12 student at GCI. “I probably wouldn’t be chilling with a lot of these boys if we weren’t playing hacky sack together,” he said, gesturing to the circle of friends around him.

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“We never really bonded as much without the sack,” he said.

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Henry Chernoff, also a Grade 12 student at GCI, concurs. “It’s getting big,” he said. “There are all sorts of other schools that’ll follow you online with their own sack teams, like Ashbury Sack,” he said of Rockcliffe Park’s Ashbury College school.

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“There’s not really competition in sack. It’s about the spirit of it. It’s a friendly way to come together. Sometimes we have elimination games, but it’s for the love of the game,” he said.

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Also known as a footbag, hacky sacks originated in the 1970s in Oregon, U.S.A., when two friends, Mike Marshall and John Stalberger, began playing a game they’d called “footbag”, according to one of its early manufacturers, Wham-O’s website.

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After this, the game continued with a steady flow of sackers until the 2000s, when most footbags would retire indefinitely to the backs of closets, storage boxes, or thrift stores. Until now.

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Despite many of these kids’ parents likely having hacky sacks of their own collecting dust, high schoolers are increasingly having a tough time finding one.

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“I do not understand where this trend is coming from, but in the last two weeks, we’ve had 30 or so high schoolers asking for hacky sacks,” said Adam McCambridge, an associate at the Sporting Life at Lansdowne Park. (He added that they do not sell them.)

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Storey and his friends tried multiple ways to get a coveted sack, from online ordering to walking around Westboro, until they finally came upon one.

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Storey knows exactly where the trend comes from. He said he first saw sackers popping up on TikTok around a month ago; mostly clips of university students that blew up online.

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Now, there are over 26,000 videos on the social media platform tagged “#hackysack,” and almost 50,000 tagged “#sack.” Algorithms are rife with videos that have millions of views on both TikTok and Instagram, instructing people on how to find them, rankings of various sacks, and best sack practices and tricks.

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But at this school, students say they only began regularly sacking a few weeks ago. Now, it’s picked up so much steam that there’s a “varsity sack team” emerging.