Three weeks ago, staff at World Footbag, the largest online retailer for the bead-filled sacks synonymous with 1980s and 90s schoolyards, noticed a sudden uptick of visitors. Within days, the influx overwhelmed the company’s servers.
The toy has come roaring back. Dubbed the “hacky sack epidemic” by teens on TikTok, it’s an analog outbreak that caught even the industry’s gatekeepers off guard.
“It got to the point where it crashed our website,” said World Footbag co-owner Greyson Herdman. His father-in-law founded the company, which began as a players association and now sells over 130 different models of hacky sacks, back in 1983. “It took off to a level that I’ve certainly never seen before.”
“Hacky Sack” is technically a brand name — the sport is known to purists as footbag. The unofficial pastime of the 1980s and 90s was a staple of suburban driveways and college quads, before receding into a dedicated niche for decades. Now, suppliers are scrambling to restock empty shelves.
On TikTok, the game has become an inescapable obsession. In the first week of May alone, U.S. posts featuring hacky sack hashtags jumped by more than 330 percent, according to figures reported by Good Housekeeping. During that same period, searches for the term on the platform increased sixfold.
For Herdman, the revival is rooted in a desire for the kind of tangible, face-to-face connection that a digital world often lacks.
“I think that it’s the camaraderie,” he said. “It’s simple play. It’s fun, but it’s meaningful, because you all get to celebrate in kind of this simple, simple achievement.”
The craze has been so relentless that World Footbag is now rationing its inventory, releasing only what its small team can realistically ship.
On the company’s voicemail, a recording from Herdman’s wife, Kayla Geuttich, now greets a constant stream of callers with a mix of gratitude and a plea for patience. In the message, she explains that the footbag boom has forced them to pivot to limited daily drops just to keep the business from being swallowed by the demand.
The current fixation on varsity status may be the latest novelty among Gen Z-ers, but for Chris Dean and Jasper Shults, the game is a lifelong discipline.
As organizers for the U.S. Open Footbag Championships, set to take over a Portland park this June, they have spent decades watching the sport ebb and flow, but neither was prepared for the sport’s sudden second life.
For Shults, 29, the revival is a matter of family legacy. His parents met at a footbag event, and his father, Kenny Shults, is a Guinness World Record holder regarded by the Footbag Hall of Fame as the greatest to ever play the game.
Yet, despite his pedigree, he spent years as a lonely torchbearer for the sport.
“I was the only person playing throughout all high school and college,” he said. Seeing the game finally trend among a younger generation, he added, feels like a long-awaited “vindication.”
Dean, 42, who began kicking as a high school freshman in the late 90s, sees the craze as a return to the sport’s social roots. He recalls a time when the bag was a staple at track meets and bus stops — a portable community, he called it, that required nothing more than a few square feet of pavement.
“It’s the perfect happy medium between hanging out and being social and also being active,” Dean said. “And with young people just being away from their screens? I feel like that’s something people crave a lot these days.”
For the veterans, the goal isn’t necessarily to turn every TikToker into a professional athlete.
“As long as you have a hacky sack in your pocket, you can find people everywhere, anywhere, at any time, in almost any space,” Shults said. “It’s a pretty amazing little thing you can have access to.”
That is, if you can get your hands on one.