Thursday, November 27, 2014

Exciting times for Footbag

The eagle has landed, Footbag Archives is live.

Finally is the first word that comes to my mind when I think about the adventures of FootbagArchives.com. I had my first footbag tournament filmed in 1989 right here in my hometown of Montreal. The images from this one are pretty degraded as it was shot in regular VHS but still one clip was produced with it and it will be published eventually.

The goal of this site is to make all of the video that I collected and edited available to the footbag community. First and foremost for the players to have souvenirs that are a little bit more solid that just their recollections. Secondly for all the ones who watched or were involved as players, tournament organizers and spectators. Of course it will also be useful for those who would want to study the game and the players that made it to the finals. Overall I always felt that a sport that is not well documented loses part of its legacy.

For this launch I will make available the finals of the five net categories at the 2014 and 2013 World Footbag Championships: Open singles, women singles, open doubles, women doubles and mixed double. There will be free previews available for each match and for those who would want to see the entire games, with the scores, they will be available on demand. The Montreal annual tournament the Akisphere 2014 is also ready in the form of the doubles finals.

I guess the match that the most people wanted to watch from Worlds 2014 is the singles finals as it's been a really long time since a player from the USA won that title. Randy Mulder was the last one to win it in 1997 and now the crown belongs to Walt Houston from Memphis, TN who defeated Florian Götze in 3 consecutive sets. So without further due let's see the preview of that match:

2014 World Footbag Championships singles net finals short preview. from Pro Kicker. Find the other free clips from Worlds 2014 here and the complete collection of full matches available on demand here

Now a little bit more on the history of this site


As I mentioned earlier I started to document footbag tournaments in 1989. The first years I pretty much gathered video about the local tournament ''Le Championnat de Footbag de Montréal'' and some of these years nothing was filmed at all. In 1996 I organized the first World Footbag Championships out of the USA. That was the occasion to film with a little better quality. A Hi 8 camera was used and a lot of images were taken by Bruno Dubuc a fellow kicker. The 1997 Montreal International Footbag Championship and 1998 Worlds were filmed with a