Xpogo

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The creation of the sport of Xpogo cannot be attributed to a single person. Since the invention of the pogo stick people have realized that there was more potential in the old jumping stick than simply bouncing up and down. It would be impossible to find out who the first person to do a trick on a pogo stick was, so we’ll keep this history compressed to the past few years of the sports existence.

 

In the summer of 1999, Dave Armstrong pulled an old rusted pogo stick out of his friend’s garage and tried bouncing on it. It didn’t take him long to master bouncing up and down and so he decided to make things a little more interesting. He tried jumping with the stick behind him, he tried jumping one handed, then no handed. Before the day was up he’d made up half a dozen tricks. The next day he attended a birthday party and found a beat up pogo stick in the garage of the party’s host and spent the next few hours making up new tricks with his brother Ned. Encouraged by his success he decided he needed a pogo stick of his own. A few weeks later for his 16th birthday, he got one.

 

Across the world thousands of similar stories are happening; bored kids pulling old pogo sticks out of the garage or shed and realizing their potential, each one of them inventing the sport of stunt pogo sticking.

 

Dave, hoping that he wasn’t the only one in the world that realized how awesome pogo sticks could be, turned to the internet to research the sport further. He found absolutely nothing. Not discouraged by this, he decided to make a stunt pogo web site so anyone else searching the internet for information on the new sport wouldn’t come up empty handed.

 

The site, which started as just a few poorly designed pages on a free website host, has grown to its current incarnation as Xpogo.com. Xpogo.com currently averages over 7,000 visitors a month and features videos and pictures from pogo stickers all over the world. It also has an active open discussion forum with nearly 200 members.

 

Most of the current stunt pogo stories start just like Dave’s but end with the jumper finding Xpogo.com and learning that stunt pogo sticking is a quickly growing sport with huge potential.

 

The site has become the hub of pogo sticking activity on the internet. It was through the site that Dan Brown organized the first nation pogo stick gathering, Pogopalooza, in 2004 in Lincoln Nebraska. Every new trick that anyone lands is announced first on Xpogo.com. The Xpogo forums are also the place to get the most up to date information on any new pogo sticks hitting the market.

 

The sport is growing quickly due to several influencing factors, like the introduction of higher quality pogo sticks like the Flybar, the Vurtego, and the Motostik, and also because stunt pogo stickers are starting to hold more events and show the sport off in public. Xpogo has been featured on a number of television shows, mentioned in newspapers and magazines, and is being talked about on countless weblogs and internet news and culture sites.

 

The name Xpogo was coined by Dave Armstrong out of necessity. When he was trying to move the website from it’s location as a sub-directory on his friend Deven’s website to its own home on the web, he wanted stuntpogo.com as his URL. However, someone has already purchased the name, but wasn’t doing anything with it. Dave couldn’t wait for their lease to expire and made up the name Xpogo.com and registered it instead. The day after Xpogo.com went live, stuntpogo.com became available. And thus, the sport was named.

 

These are the most common sticks used: