“I thought it was hella performative, and I was making fun of it, but then I tried, and it’s really fun. So I changed my mind, I mean, it’s performative, when they put on the Brazilian music and sh*t, but if you’re just playing to have fun in the sun it’s not,” Garfield senior Kale Spade remarked when asked why people sack. In recent weeks, an obsession with “the sack” has spread throughout the nation. Everywhere you turn, someone is sacking. As non-performative, normal folk, we decided to test the trend for ourselves by locating hacky sacks and practicing our skills.

First we headed to Target. To our surprise, after searching for what felt like hours, a stout, middle-aged gentleman informed us that Target was completely sackless. Clearly, he wasn’t a sacker. Even though Target was a bust on the sack front, we managed to pick up some of Peachybbie’s Froggy Limeade Frosty Slime and Raspberry Tru Fru. We were devastated that we couldn’t find a sack, but we cut our losses and bravely continued on. After searching 7-Eleven, REI, and Tukwila’s Walmart Superstore, we finally got our hands on a sack in Walmart’s party section. Who knew a bag of rice was so hard to find?

Now with our sack and slime, we raced back north to Volunteer Park to test our inquiry. We trekked to a sunny spot and began our sacking experience. We practiced some “stalls,” which require catching and balancing the sack on your foot. After failing miserably and getting excreted on by a pigeon, we realized that the sack wasn’t for us. So, to finally answer the question of if sacking is passion or performative, we moved on to interviews.

“Sack is life, and it’s not even LARP… We can have fun in the sun outside with our friends, without doing bad things,” Garfield senior Cash Landis said when asked why he sacks. 

Landis is one of many students that participates in and enjoys the growing hacky sack trend. Another senior, Reuben Gross Keck, noted that “ the fact that people do it is just a TikTok trend. But if it’s in front of you, it’s pretty fun. But like 95% of the time it’s performative.” If hacky sacking is truly for passion, then the sport will endure past its current popularity; only time will reveal the truth of the “sport”.