SACK ATTACK RED-WRAPPED STUDENTS FROM SPOKANE WOW FANS AT STATE HOOPS TOURNAMENTS

When is a champion basketball team upstaged by a bunch of big red
sacks? The Saxons of Joel E. Ferris High in Spokane find that it
happens whenever the school's drill team presents its
extraordinary Silly Sack routine at the state high school
tournament in Seattle. The fans' reaction to the routine has been
so enthusiastic that the Saxons' coach, Wayne Gilman, has been
referred to at tournament games as ``the one with the sack
dance.''

Silly Sacks are stretchy red bags made of Luxureen, a
nylon-spandex fabric. Thirty members of the Ferris dance and drill
team zip themselves into the bags and perform a routine that is by
turns strange, enchanting and funny. During a three-minute dance
that is set to the theme song from the movie Ghostbusters and the
Huey Lewis tune The Heart of Rock & Roll, the Sacks hop like the
fairies in Walt Disney's Fantasia, drop to the floor and move in
unison to create a wildly beating heart, transform themselves into
giant twirling playing cards and shrink into wizened phantoms.
Pom-pom shakers they're not: Laker Girls from Mars is more like
it.

Last year, as Coach Gilman's team was winning the Washington State
AAA championship, it was the Sacks who grabbed much of the
attention. They were written up in The Seattle Times, featured on
TV news programs and beamed statewide during coverage of the
championship game.

``It was so bizarre that it was actually kind of cool,'' says
Carlos Del Valle, a sports anchor with KING5-TV who included the
sack dance in his tournament coverage. ``I've never seen anything
like it.''

The sack dance is the brainchild of Nancy Butz, a home and
family-life teacher at Ferris High who has been coaching the
dance and drill team for 10 years. For the 1991 Rubber Chicken,
the annual basketball game between Ferris and Lewis and Clark
High, Butz wanted to unveil a new routine that would win the
school-spirit competition. ``We wanted to break out of the
traditional niche and do some progressive things,'' she says.
``The theme of that year's Rubber Chicken game was Our Hearts Go
Out to You, and I wondered what we could do.''

Butz remembered having seen a videotape of kids at a summer camp
dancing inside bags to the Ghostbusters theme, and from that the
Silly Sack routine was born. With help from her students, she
choreographed a show that began and ended with the Sacks forming
an enormous heart and ``beating'' in time to heartbeat sound
effects.

At the Rubber Chicken game, however, the Sacks laid an egg. ``It
was so bizarre that people didn't know what to do,'' recalls Butz.
``They didn't know if it was supposed to be funny or serious. My
kids came off the floor and asked, `What did we do wrong?' I said,
`Nothing. They just didn't get it.' We lost the Rubber Chicken
that year.''

It was a different story later that season at the state tournament
in Seattle. After the Ferris drill team performed its sack dance
during a first-round game, word got out about the show.

``What was incredible was that nobody left their seats during
halftime,'' recalls Joe Bullock, then the director of the boys'
AAA tournament. ``People were running to the tunnels trying to get
a look. Folks weren't sitting and watching; they were standing.''

Except for a few elementary school appearances by the Silly Sacks,
the red bags were folded up and put away until last year's
tournament. And although no teams from Ferris made it to the
championship this year, the Sacks, who will be missed in Seattle,
are keeping their routine honed in the hope of being called up
again at the end of next season.

``It's kind of hard to say anything good about them, because
they're our archrivals,'' says Tom Storey, a Lewis and Clark
senior and former center on the basketball team. ``But they're
pretty unique.''

Jim Gullo lives in Seattle and has written several stories for
Sports Illustrated.

THREE COLOR PHOTOS:PHOTOGRAPHS BY CHRISTOPHER ANDERSON Butz (top left) helps bag her dancers for their routine, which ranges from creepy to madcap. [Nancy Butz helping dancer put on Silly Sack; Silly Sack dancers standing in rows with their chins on their hands; row of Silly Sack dancers standing on one foot with their arms and legs outstretched]