2007 Montreal Footbag Championships Videos finally on line

After almost a year of dedicated work Gilles Demers just came forward with a series of 7 clips rendering the 2007 Montreal Footbag Championships most important matches and best moments. Camera work by Yves Archambault and Dominic O'Brien, footage provided by Pro Kicker

Judge by yourself just follow the link

First Day at the Green Cup

The Green Cup presented by Chaos started today in Oakland. Here are a couple of pictures of the action that happened on the net courts.





The Green cup is sponsored by Pro Kicker and the official footbag for the tournament is the Pro Kicker Impact

A simple Footbag net tale

Footbag net is a really small sport. Not because it doesn't have all it takes to be more in the public eye. It's fast and spectacular, combining martial art moves with ball control that many professionnal soccer players would envy. So what's the problem?

I guess we just didn't find the right person yet to make it to the mainstream. Most tournaments are poorly organized, not because of the organizers intentions, but you can just go so far without money. No bleachers to sit spectators, no publicity or press releases the tournament often end up being a confidential affair between dedicated players.

It's still a lot of fun from all the people you meet but the sport stagnates a little bit too much for my taste.

I organized 3 world Championships and I think I did my best. We have tournaments here in Montreal since 1989 and more and more people know about the sport but it is still a very small fraction of the population. One other reason why it's still so unknown is that pretty much all the newspapers sports section are exclusively reserved to the 'big' sports. There's no room for alternative stuff anymore, is there room for journalists? I always thought that part of the journalist job was to dig for newer stuff, so I repeat the question: Is there still journalits? I mean real ones. (That would be of course according to my definition :-)

To know more about Footbag

The non sports according to me

I am a Footbag player (aka Hacky Sack which is a trademark), we play over a 5 foot net on a badminton court. When I have interviews with various journalists one question often comes back: Is this really a sport. Well if you have to run to retrieve a Footbag, then pass it and spike over the net I guess it is.

For me it is obvious. What is not so obvious is why people call things like poker, automobile racing, curling and golf, why do they label those things sports? For me sports has something to do with a lot of movement generated by the person, sweating, burning a lot of calories and normally it's a race, on foot, on a bike, a scoring game like soccer and hockey, volleyball, basketball where people move for real.

Poker is a game where people sit down and throw a card from time to time but I find it in the sports section of my newspaper, which enrages me.

Auto racing, the engine does all the work, the driver doesn't even move one inch by himself. Some reply that you have to be really fit to be a race car driver. I had a job once where I had to bend metal corners with a sledgehammer for 12 hours a day. I made me really fit but was I doing sport? Auto racing is not a sport, it's a stupid activity in which grown ups burn fuel for nothing, plus it's so boooring.

I was really laughing when my girlfriend told me that she was traumatized when she was a kid by watching TV and seing some curling. What was the trauma about, she just couldn't understand why these old people brooming the ice were in a sports broadcast. I'm just like her.

Golf now, a dandy game made for rich people to show off their social status. So much fertilizer is spent on the greens alone that it could feed the entire world. Fat people hitting one stroke and then driving a motorized cart to the next hole is that your definition of a sport? Yes Tiger Woods is fit but why doesn't he prove that he can perform something great in a real sport? Why don't they have to run as fast as possible to the next hole? After all it's the only reason why Biathlon is a sport. They have to ski and ski fast to the next shoot.

Well this is a non exhautive list of what I consider not to be sports but (foolish) games.

Fun Footbag Net practice in Montreal today

I have to be fit to a minimum by May 24th. This is gonna be the start of the Green Cup, one of the North American Footbag Net scene main events.(The Green Cup is held in Oakland and San Francisco) After being trapped in a gym, that was trapped under tons of snow in Montreal for 7 months it's really good to finally get to play outdoors.

Our sport doesn't necessitate a lot of equipment: a specially adapted badminton portable court, a footbag and a good pair of sport shoes.

We kicked, we got prepared and no one is better to take the Montreal crew lightly at the Green Cup.

I will play with Berliner Ulli Haase and I expect to have fun. The worst that can happen is to fall in the Tequila bracket after all.

Other references for the Green Cup: Organizing club Chaos
and the mother and father of all footbag sites:
Footbag Worldwide

Results for the 2008 ProKicker Windchill Footbag Net tournament

That's it the 18th edition of the Montreal Windchill is a thing of the past. We had interesting battles during this tournament and I was part of one. My partner Samuel Cloutier and I fought former World Champions John Leys and Emmanuel Bouchard in one of the Doubles semi-finals. We took a 14-6 lead in the first game of the 2 out of 3 but unfortunately we could never close the deal and gave 10 points, having 5 or 6 game points on the way. We scored 10 points in the second game to a final result of 16-14 and 15-10 in favor of John and Emmanuel. Strangely enough they ended up winning the finals against François Depatie-Pelletier and Luc Legault on the same scores!?

Samuel and I managed to earn a 3rd place spot by winning over a disbanded J-F Lemieux and Gilles Demers team.

In the singles action J-F Lemieux earned a second title at the Windchill (after 2006)by defeating an exhausted John Leys.

See the complete results for this competition on ProKicker

The Montreal Canadiens win a second game in the post season

My favorite sports team, the Montreal Canadiens, yes it's ice hockey what do you expect I'm canadian? played with fire tonight against the Boston Bruins. Although I think that Montreal is far superior they went on to win a 3-2 overtime game that was far from being convincing. They played softly during long moments in the game like if they were not taking the Bruins very seriously. The Boston team managed to clinch a playoff spot and that should be enough to earn them a lot of respect.

So Canadiens well done but please wake-up for the rest of the series.

The Chicago Inner Rectangle Footbag Net club web site is alive

My partner Cory Current and I were driving back to Illinois from the Memphis tournament last monday when I learned that the Chicago Footbag net club didn't have a real name or a web site. I decided to help as it is very easy to set up a web site on a blog platform. Cory told me that he had thought about the Inner Rectangle as a potential name for the Club. The Chicago Footbag Freestyle club name is the Inner Circle so as Footbag net is played on a rectangle (badminton court) it was a good joke to be made as well as a relevant one to call the club the Inner Rectangle. So be it and we launched the club's blog/website last monday on http://inner-rectangle.blogspot.com, pay them a visit and leave your comments if you are interested in Footbag.

Here's the link to the Inner Rectangle very first post

Long Haul to the Southeastern Footbag Championships

Tonight's the night. I will leave Montreal around 3 am to ride to Burlington, Vt to catch a plane to Chicago. Once I arrive there I'll meet with my doubles net partner Cory Current. We'll then drive another 8 hours to Memphis, Tn, in order to be present for the warm-up practice scheduled for friday 1pm. Then we'll play in the tournament on the 5th and 6th.

This may seem like a hell of a road trip just for a small tourney but it's gonna be a lot of fun to hangout in the south. It's gonna be warmer for one thing, we're still in sub 0 (celsius) weather here. Then it's gonna be a good time on the road with my good buddy Cory. We saw each other for the last time in july 2007 at the Montreal Tournament and I was pretty busy as I was directing the tournament. We both were at the World Championships in august but didn't have a real chance to hang out.

Then it's gonna be fun to play outdoors as we've been crammed in a gym since september. And the most important thing meet with friends that I don't see too often at all. Viva Footbag.

We had a crazy practice tonight Footbag in Montreal

Our practices on tuesday night are scheduled from 7h15 pm to 8h45 and from 9 pm to 10h30 pm it's pretty cool. I want to thank the 2 unknown that set up our nets every tuesday and thursday for us to spike it down: Norm and Emilie, thank you! You're awesome and without you we wouldn't play Footbag Net.

Montreal Footbag Club

Another easy trick to help the environment, while saving money

Tire pressure, I know it's a pain to check it out. We're supposed to do it once a month. If only all the tires were at the right pressure it would save 4 millions of gallons of gas a day in the US only. That also means it would be cheaper for you to drive. So get the little tool and check it out once in a while would you?

Peace on earth

Peace on earth, peace on earth, peace on earth. It's my last 30 seconds Mantra. I had negative thoughts about an ex-friend and then I thought what the hell! I don't have time or energy to loose with that. It made me come back in the 70's when I was having a blast listening to intelligent and articulate music. When I thought that I was gonna be a musician (bass player) playing Jazz-Rock-Progressive compositions for the rest of my life. When I thought that we could change the world and that it was still cool to say "Peace"

Well, it still is. Peace on earth, peace on earth, peace on earth!

Tales from the trip, European Footbag Championships 2000 in Paris

My partner Sébastien Perron has a blog referring to his numerous adventures while touring for demonstrating the Handsack game.

I had some pretty amazing stories happening to me while traveling for Footbag. For example in 2000 I went to the European Championships in Paris. You have to know that I have to wear knee braces to play after pretty extensive surgeries. At the time I had a brace on my right knee and I had just exploded it after sliding to try to retrieve an out of control Footbag. That had happened at the Quebec tournement. So we were practicing on july 14th, kind of a general warm-up before the tournament. Another ball was shanked far away from me and I rushed to it to try to kick it back to my partner. I slid again and exploded my brace one more time. July 14th is the national day of France so, as you can imagine, everything is closed. There was no question in my mind that without my brace I had to skip the tournament which would have been heartbreaking as I traveled specifically for that. I was also the 1999 singles net champion and I really wanted to defend.

So I asked around to the organizers and other frenchmen. They suggested that I asked the Park guardians, which I did. Something magical happened right there, the first guy I talked to had a little motorbike repair shop in its garage. He was in a small club of bike lovers and they were doing their own tweaking of engines etc... I explained how he could easily fix it by drilling a couple of hole and joining the ruptured side metal bar side with a smaller metal piece and 2 screws. One hour later the guy came back with the brace fixed, never wanted me to pay him or anything and was just very modest about it.

I finally ended up winning singles and doubles net (with danish player Jakob Hall) at this tournament and I had a blast. It's common to hear that Parisians are nasty and rude, well don't count me in to propagate that image because besides that particular story I've always been treated great in the city of lights.

Today I finally took my bike out of the basement

Wow! We had so much snow this winter that I had to leave my bike stored in the basement. It was the first time in years that I couldn't ride in the winter although I saw some real courageous people pedaling in the ice and snow. This was just too much for me. But today the freedom came back. There's nothing like feeling the air while you create your own locomotion. Of course I would feel guilty not to do it as much as I can. Even if I own a car it's not an excuse to become lazy. Who knows I might even get fat :-)

Of course I want to have the smallest possible print on my planet's environment and that's why bicyle is part of my top 10 greatest inventions of all time. As a semi-professional athlete I also use biking as part of my training routine.

Part of living in Montreal is having to deal with people stealing bicycles. It's a pleague and that's why I have a real shitty looking 2 wheeler. It's not handling great but I always put a hundred bucks or more every summer to make it bearable without having to worry about its dissapearance.

So that all for now folks, I have to take off for my Footbag practice, which I'm gonna ride to...on my bike!

Skills games on ProKicker

For the past 26 years I've been involved in selling and promoting Footbag. It's basically a cheap way to get in shape. Recently I've added some more skills games to my web site. In 1990 I've been part of the first National Takraw school tour in the US. Takraw is very popular in southeast Asia, it's a really fun mix of soccer and volleyball. It's now available on ProKicker as well as two other cool games.

I discovered Peteca a few years ago at Footbag tournaments. It's a brazilian game played with a big shuttlecock over a net similar to a volleyball net. Very inexpensive it makes kids moooove! The other game is the Handsack, you can make all sorts of tricks while catching this object with the back of the hand. Nice!

I'm not against video games per say, but a few hours a week doing something healthier can make for more balanced lifestyle fir kids.

Check out this Peteca video

Memphis Footworks: April 5th and 6th Tournament Officially IFPA Sanctioned!

Memphis Footworks: April 5th and 6th Tournament Officially IFPA Sanctioned! Hope to see as many kickers as possible at this Footbag tournament. I'll be there, and will try my best to win it.

This video is from the 2006 Southeastern

The Montreal Canadiens beat the Ottawa Senators

The mighty Canadiens were flying to a crushing victory over Ottawa, leading 7-1 after 2 periods. They lost a lot of their intensity and Ottawa came back scoring 4 goals in a row. Nonetheless Montreal finally won this very important game when approaching the post-season. With this win the Canadiens managed to clinch a sure place in the series. Montrealers are thrilled about their club and now we just hope that they'll go far, and who knows maybe even win the Stanley cup, although I wouldn't bet on it.