Bay Area Hoopers gather together somewhere in the San Francisco Bay Area weekly, typically on Sunday afternoons, to crank up the tunes and hoop it up. What is hooping?
Find out. Our hoop group unexpectedly began on April 27, 2003, at a party at
Min Jung Kim's house in the Oakland hills.
Vera Fleischer and
Philo Hagen met that night and wound up hooping on the back deck together for hours. At the end of the party
Jason Strauss decided to give each of them a hoop on the condition they would make good use of it. Philo said, making it up as he went along, "Well of course we will, don't you know that Vera and I are the co-chairs of, uhm, Bay Area Hoopers?" Vera joined in being quite serious, adding, "Yes, don't you know that we meet in the park every week for hooping."
The Lady Leblanc overheard this conversation and asked if they were serious. They replied that they were, others chimed in about joining, and the next day half a dozen hoopers met in Dolores Park for what would be the first Bay Area Hoopers gathering. Much to everyone's surprise, more than four years later, with more than 350 people on the
Yahoo Group location announcement list, and 270 in our
Tribe.net tribe, Bay Area Hoopers has continued to meet at least once each week. And through publicity from
The San Francisco Chronicle and
Hooping.org Magazine, BAH has inspired many other hoop groups to form across the country and around the world.
