SOUTH BERWICK — Marshwood High School’s baseball players are going viral. But it isn’t for a record-setting fastball or a flashy home run celebration.
Pull up their Instagram account, boasting nearly 2,000 followers, and watch as members of the team, in their practice uniforms, kick around a toy that dates back to the ’70s: a hacky sack.
In one video, the boys perform a move called “Football.” One kicks the hacky sack into the air in hopes it will land on another’s back. That student stands up and lets it fall so a teammate behind him can punt it across the field. The clip has almost 5 million views and nearly 5,000 reposts.
Other videos on the account have reached similar numbers and have gained national attention amid a resurrected craze over hacky sacking among teenagers across the country. But how did it make its comeback in Maine?
At Marshwood, students said a cellphone ban allowed them to find alternative activities during downtime.
The friends had picked up their first footbag — the formal term for a hacky sack — before the ban. But once it kicked in, they found themselves with nothing better to do.
“Once they took our phones, it was like, we can hacky sack more now,” said junior catcher Ryder Webber, who usually films the players’ content after school, once they’re allowed to have their phones again.
Webber said his science teacher always had hacky sacks in the classroom and would let him and his friends borrow them during study hall.
“It was really hard to learn at first,” said junior first baseman James Morecroft.
He’s now the team-appointed “best hacky sacker,” according to Michael Sbrizza, a junior pitcher and one of the baseball team’s captains.
“But when he started, he was terrible,” Sbrizza said with a laugh.
As interest grew, an informal team was created, and other students started bringing their own footbags to school.
Now, they create their own specialty tricks and terms. Some, like “keyhole” — what they say when the footbag falls through their legs as they try to kick it — are used universally. When the hacky sack lands on the side of their head, they say “side temple” but have shortened it to “semple.”
“It’s weird because we started doing it six months ago,” Morecroft said. “All of the sudden, you look on the internet, it’s all over the country.”
Marshwood principal Richard Gowers said he and his staff have noticed the uptick and find it refreshing to see students engaging with one another instead of looking at their phones.
“The spontaneity of people playing hacky sack is real,” Gowers said. He sees it as a way to help build community and spirit among Marshwood students.
A STATEWIDE COMPETITION
The Marshwood hacky sackers call themselves a team, but they don’t participate in competitions with other schools. Instead, another Instagram account acts as a de facto governing body for Maine high school teams.
The competition is completely virtual, with a March Madness-style bracket that’s updated as teams submit videos through a statewide group chat. The best video wins, as long as it adheres to the rules: one video with five or fewer “sackers.”
“We want to win the tournament,” Morecroft said.
The bracket was released before the team posted its most viral video and did not initially include Marshwood’s team in its rankings. Since then, though, the students have been contacted by House of Highlights — a digital sports media brand with millions of followers — and other brands hoping to repost their content. They’ve also been asked to review specific footbags for a commission and said one brand even offered to sponsor them.
The team also hopes to acquire a pair of smart glasses, with a built-in camera, to make filming easier, Sbrizza said.
Now that they’re in the running for the tournament, team members said last week that they feel like they have a good chance of being crowned champion with the most followers and most viral videos of any Maine team.
For now, the Marshwood hacky sackers are independent of the high school. Team members said they enjoy having their own activity without school-based restrictions.
Gowers, the principal, said he would be happy to consider adding the team as an official club if the students asked.
“If it was something where we could supervise, to help, to encourage, that would be great,” he said.
The most involved hacky sackers are juniors. Before they graduate next year, they hope to pass the legacy of their team down.
“There’s a lot of freshman baseball players that we could pass it down to,” Morecroft said.
And the middle school already has its own hacky sack team — could those students be Marshwood’s next online sensations?
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