Hacky sack
ball game
A hacky sack is a small, round bag usually filled with plastic pellets or sand, which is kicked into the air as part of a competitive game or as a display of dexterity. "Hacky Sack" is the name of a brand of footbag popular in the 1970s (currently owned by Wham-O), which has since become a generic trademark.
The most common game of footbag consists of two or more players standing in a circle and trying to keep the sack off the ground for as long as possible.
History
Footbag-like activities have existed for many years. The game is similar to the Japanese game of kemari, and some Southeast Asian games, such as chinlone, sepak takraw and sipa. The same principle is applied in association football–playing countries in activities of freestyle football and keepie uppie. It is also similar to traditional Asian games of kicking the shuttlecock, known as jianzi, chapteh, đá cầu, and jegichagi.
The current Western incarnation of the sport was invented in 1972 by Mike Marshall and John Stalberger of Oregon City, Oregon, United States with their "Hacky Sack" product, the trademark rights to which are now owned by Wham-O. Although Marshall died in 1975, Stalberger continued the business. It gained national popularity in the early 1980s, and Stalberger sold the trademark to Wham-O in 1983.
A few select players have been considered either the greatest freestyler or the greatest net player of all time, including Vasek Klouda for freestyle and Emmanuel Bouchard for net, but few players have claimed a mastery of both disciplines.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 22, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q845399. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1972, 1975 and 1983.
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This entry incorporates text from “Hacky sack” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.