Highlights

IFPA is so excited that the World Footbag Championships will be happening again this year, after a 2-year absence. Both the European Championships and Worlds will be in Poland at the end of July, 2022. Thank you to the organizers and everyone who is helping, Your effort and dedication to footbag is appreciated. The IFPA Board of Directors would like to welcome the players back to competition and invite everyone in this community to give input on how we can grow this sport and increase participation.

Since the summer of 2020, there have been a lot of changes at IFPA. Arthur Ledain was elected as the Executive Director in August, 2020. Arthur shared his vision and ideas to help grow the sport's popularity a video (VLOG3) which was published in July of 2020 before the election. This videos and more are hosted and shared with the footbag community on IFPA's YouTube Channel.

As the Executive Director of IFPA, Arthur Ledain has a two-part vision. Arthur has been dedicating countless hours for the past 2 years building a team and working toward that vision. On the practical side, the goal is to restructure the IFPA to be more efficient. On the strategic side, the vision is an approach of how to grow the sport. Arthur and his team have a 3-fold approach to both prongs: communication, responsibility, and transparency.

To be more efficient, we propose a project-based structure the IFPA board with more meaningful positions. With a project based approach, tasks and projects can be proposed and approved, run by a project manager and with a deadline. To facilitate this more fluid and dynamic approach, we want to reduce the number of elected positions and the term lengths. These changes require updates to the IFPA bylaws, which requires by the membership . More details about the bylaws changes are explained in the section below.

The vision to grow the sport ultimately is the job of people in the local communities. This is the best way to recruit new players. This is not the task of IFPA, except to help inspire and help. The best way IFPA can help with this it to get more exposure for the sport during the week of Worlds. IFPA would like to reduce the time that the World Championships is inside a gym to free up time to promote the sport with the worlds best players in the host city. We need to expose footbag to the public, especially the younger age groups. We also want to restructure some of the events to make them more appealing and accessible to a wider circle of the public.

Here is a summary of IFPA's recent accomplishments.

  1. European Footbag Championships (Jaworzno, Poland, July 22-24, 2022)

  2. 2022 World Footbag Championships (Krakow, Poland, July 27-31, 2022), link https://worlds2022.footbag.pl/

  3. Communications: Newsletter, January 2021 ; Newsletter, January 2022 - announcing the dates and locations for Euros and Worlds; Updates regarding the war in Ukraine; April 2022 Update on Worlds in Poland

  4. Online Worlds 2020 and 2021 (Thanks, Sergio)

  5. Propose new bylaws

  6. Changes to this year's Worlds to support the vision

  7. Tim Vozar keeps the books at IFPA and prepares the annual tax returns. Thanks, Tim!