Sports

Josh stacks up again to defend world title

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By Bill Moss, Published: May 18, 2014

A 3-3-3 stack lasts only a second and a half and the longest stacking event, called the Cycle, takes less than 6 seconds. Is there really drama in the sport of speed stacking?

When you're the best stacker in the world, there is.
Josh Hainsel, a 14-year-old eighth grader at Rugby Middle School, defended his world speed stacking title in Jeonju, South Korea, last month and, yes, it was dramatic. In speed stacking, the stacker starts out with the cups spread on a table, "up stacks" the cups to create a pyramid and then "down stacks" them back where they started.
Josh was the reigning world champion, having won the title in Orlando in April of 2013. He's a celebrity in the world of speed stacking.
"Josh was very well known by all the other stackers," said his mom, Andrea Hainsel, a banker at First Citizens Bank. In Jeonju he competed against 342 stackers from 18 countries.
An upset was in the making when the stackers reached the end of the competition. Josh had finished in the top 3 in the 3-3-3 and the Cycle events and made it to the final round of the competition, called the Stack of Champions. Heading into his final opportunity to stack, Josh had fallen to third place.
"He went up on stage needing to get a really good time and he pulled out his best time ever," Andrea said. "It was really dramatic and fun."
A YouTube video of the event shows Josh finishing the Cycle stack — a sequence of stacks known as a 3-6-3, a 6-6 and a 1-10-1 — in 5.45 seconds, a personal record and a tenth of a second slower than the world record of 5.303.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ooTgeKwJ9Ms&list=UUEOESkghZcGABJwIm0J8zrw
Although he competes in the 13-14 age group, Josh was the fastest of stackers of all ages. The world's fastest stackers tend to be younger. His father, Brian, made it on to Team USA as a stacker, and his mom has stacked, too. But no one in the family stacks anywhere near as fast Josh.
Zach, Josh, Andrea and Brian Hainsel/Speed stacking has taken the family to Turkey, Orlando, Baltimore and other cities in the U.S. and abroad. Speed stacking was added as a sport in the Junior Olympics and Josh will compete in that event in August.
Josh tends to respond to an interviewer's questions with very short answers or look to his mom for a cue on whether he liked visiting the Korean DMZ. But when he demonstrates, he is in his world. He wears a barely perceptible grin when he stacks. If he muffs a stack, he correct it so fast it's almost impossible to see. He practices stacking one to two hours a day.
After a 12-hour plane flight from Detroit brought them to Seoul, South Korea, the Hainsels took to a tour bus to the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea. When they attended a professional baseball game, they learned that South Korea baseball fans are very passionate about the sport.
After the tournament, the family traveled back to Seoul to come home.
"Because we got on the plane on April 28, his birthday was 37 hours long," Andrea said.