Introduction
With this short book (and corresponding website), my goal is to provide an opinionated introduction to the fascinating world of modern club passing. Like many areas of juggling, club passing is a field that has its own community that continuously pushes the field and invents and shares new patterns and new styles of passing. I have learned many things from this community and tremendously enjoy patterns that go beyond traditional 6-club 4-count ("every others") and 7-club 2-count and 2-count/4-count feeds. In passing corners at juggling festivals and at festivals dedicated to passing, it is now common to find ambidextrous 4-handed siteswaps with zaps and triple selfs and Roundabout-style manipulator pattern of various difficulty with 3 to 5 people.
Getting into modern club passing can be intimidating and overwhelming. There are so many patterns, notations, and video collections, it can be difficult to know where to start and where to go next, and how to even figure out what's going on. I try to provide a clear guide, laying out possible paths to learn patterns and skills that incrementally build on each other and increase in difficulty. Along the way, I'll compactly introduce necessary notation and concepts, which allows sharing and explaining individual patterns more compactly.
I try to curate and guide in a short book, rather than create a comprehensive repository. With this book, you will learn the essentials that are broadly known in the passing community -- at any level you will likely find people to pass interesting and challenging patterns with. You will find plenty of patterns beyond the basics to push yourself, and also gain the skill to find, read, and create other patterns.
What is modern club passing? Modern club passing is ambidextrous. Modern club passing is combining passes at different heights (zaps, singles, doubles) with zips, flips, heffs, and triple selfs. Modern club passing is to slow down and control the pattern. Modern club passing embraces manipulator and walking patterns with 3 or more people. Modern club passing is for the passer and not for an audience, constantly pushing the boundaries and trying more challenging patterns, even when they all look the same from the outside. Modern club passing is not a fixed concept but a term I embrace for the kind of passing that I and many in the passing community like.