Sarah Breese never once hula hooped as a kid.
Boy, has she come around — and around and around.
Three years after she first twirled a plastic circle, the local artist teaches others the fine art of hula hooping and makes them, too.
For Breese, 33, it was love at first spin.
She stumbled upon a hula-hoop loving fellow artist in a Phoenix community garden who convinced Breese to give it a whirl. Hooping hooked her.
“I got it instantly,” recalls the Dallas transplant, who last semester taught hooping to Catalina Foothills School District youngsters through an after-school program. “I loved it. I became obsessed.”
Breese ended up taking over the artist’s hula hoop-making business, What’s All the Hoopla, and spun one every chance she got, even lugging a hoop to her Pima Community College Classes or along Fourth Avenue when she went to catch live music. This summer — as she frantically tried to raise extra cash for the annual Burning Man festival — she took an armful of hoops to Bookmans Sports Exchange. The timing was perfect, says store manager Elaine Eckert.
Customers had been asking for them, but trying to locate a wholesale source was tricky.
“Fortuitously, Sarah just walked in,” Eckert says, adding that it’s a bonus the hoops are locally made.
Bookmans, 3330 E. Speedway, has been carrying them ever since and sells two kids-size hoops for $24 and $28 and a 40-inch adult-size for $40.
Breese, who also makes body care products and creates metal and paper art, crafts the super-sized circles out of 160-psi irrigation tubing that she says is actually outlawed here for its intended use because the tubing leaks. It makes a wickedly good hula hoop, though, after the ends are connected and the whole shebang is artfully wrapped in tape.
Because hers are heavier, exercise hoops, they’re easier to use, Breese says. A lot of times, adults grab their kids’ hoops and are disappointed they can’t get their spin on. The likely problem is the hoop is too small.
“It’s physics, it goes around too fast,” says Breese, who can fire hoop and do tricks with names like the “pizza toss” and “the vortex.”
Get the right size and calorie-burning entertainment is at your fingertips — and waist.
“I’ve worked muscle groups I didn’t know I had with hula hooping,” Breese says. “It’s a fun way to exercise.”
