Ellis Piltz

He's not a teen, but we think you want to read his story…When Ellis, an avid skater, hung up his board in his mid-teens, it wasn't because he'd outgrown it. He'd discovered an even wilder action sport-footbag.

The old stereotypical image of footbag-a ring of grungy hippies booting around a Hacky-Sack-is dead, says Ellis. Footbag has evolved into a vivid dance of individual tricks and spins, demanding strength, grace, and stamina. "We are where skateboarding was about ten, fifteen years ago," says Ellis. "The athletic/professional side of the sport is just now breaking through to the popular level. All these kids are actually learning tricks, learning how fun it is to travel around and go to tournaments, improve their own skills. It's not a dorky sport at all any more, and it's not a hippie sport either."

Ellis's specialty is the individual freestyle, a two-minute routine set to music. Freestyle offers the athlete a few tough choices. "There's the shred competition, where you go as hard as you can for as long as you can," says Ellis, "and there's the Big Three, where you hit the biggest three tricks possible-which basically involves spins, going around the bag several times with your legs or your head." It's not easy, and it can't be done if you're messing with things that aren't good for your body. Ellis trains hard and stays away from anything-drugs, alcohol, or cigarettes-that might slow him down. "I'd say most of the top players stay away from them," he says. "They cloud your mind, and don't allow you to stay focused and shred as hard as you want."

Now one of the top ten shredders in the world, Ellis credits his success to hard work and his anti-drug: honesty. "All your choices come from keeping it real with one thing-yourself," he says. "If you're honest with yourself, you'll be honest with others and make the best decisions in all situations."

Ellis, now 22, didn't always make the best decisions. But now, at least, he's pretty honest about his own past drug use. "I've been there, and I realize it's a pretty dark place," he says. "I realized it at a young age, and I've kind of taken my life under control since then. I wasn't a crack addict or anything, but it was enough to at least scare me a little and make me realize that everyone has great potential, and they just need to put their minds in the right place for it."

Scared no more, and with his mind in the right place, Ellis, now 22, has become not only one of the sport's best competitors-he's one of its loudest boosters. As founder of Zohar Productions, a maker of action sports videos, Ellis also stages festival shows around the country, sponsored by Nike. "I've been producing footbag videos for about three years, and now I'm kind of breaking out from the underground and exposing the sport in the true light that it should be," says Ellis. "Things are rolling now."

--To learn more about the exciting sport of footbag, check out Footbag Worldwide at www.footbag.org .