Bottle flipping becomes the rage with middle schoolers

By Dugan Arnett and Sonia Rao GLOBE STAFF AND GLOBE CORRESPONDENT
SEPTEMBER 30, 2016

Meghan Enwright had reached her limit. Exasperated by her young sons’ maddening
new habit of flipping half-filled water bottles into the air in an effort to land them
upright, the Marshfield mother pecked out a quick Facebook post voicing her
displeasure.

“If my kids flip a water bottle one more time. . .”

Almost immediately the responses from other parents started rolling in.

“Thought it was just my kids!”

“IT IS DRIVING ME MAD!!!!!!!”

“All. Summer. Long.’’

It’s not hard these days to find kids flipping bottles: at bus stops, at middle-school
lunchroom tables, inside Little League dugouts, even on national television. At one
point during last week’s Patriots broadcast, a camera cut to some kids in the Gillette
Stadium stands, absent-mindedly bottle flipping as the home team rolled to victory.

“It’s an epidemic,” Alyssa Lefrancois of East Taunton said recently, as one of her four
children attempted to flip a bottle into the cup-holder of her car. “My son went to the
Little League World Series, and they were teaching the kids from Japan how to do it.”

For kids, the draw is simple. Even in an age of digital distractions, this diversion is
quick, it’s portable, and while the science behind it is actually fairly elaborate — water,
angular momentum, and gravity paving the way for a soft landing — it requires no
training. As Nolan Barry, 13, a seventh-grader from Foxborough, earnestly explains,
“It’s something you have to experience.”

For those wondering how this started — or simply in search of a target for their ire — a
good place to start would be Michael Senatore, an 18-year-old from Charlotte, N.C.,
who could be described as the Godfather of bottle-flipping.

Last spring, finding himself without an act for his high school talent show, Senatore
decided to try his hand at bottle-flipping, a hobby he and his classmates had dabbled in
a year earlier. Armed with some dramatic music and a good amount of swagger, the
teen strolled on stage and, with a flip of the wrist, landed a small, partly filled plastic
bottle upright onto a nearby table.

The brief performance, which sent those in the audience into hysterics, was captured on
video, and you can guess what happened next: 5 million YouTube views, a trove of
gushing blog posts, an appearance by Senatore on “The Late Show with Stephen
Colbert.”
Not least of all, it brought the previously underground art of bottle-flipping to the
masses. Since then, legions of participants have pushed it forward, adding twists along
the way.

No longer, for example, does a traditional flip like Senatore’s cut it. “Capping” — that is,
flipping a bottle so it lands balanced on its cap — might now be the quickest path to
school-yard glory. YouTube, meanwhile, is filled with videos of Senatore acolytes
attempting increasingly creative and challenging flips: off trampolines, atop
hoverboards, through basketball hoops.

“Across the street,” says West Roxbury resident John P. Chojnowski, whose 12-year-old
son Jed has become obsessed with bottle flipping, “[one] landed on the neighbor’s cat.”
Despite the glowing reviews of adolescent flippers, parents have been far less
enamored.

There’s the incessant thump … thump … thump of partly-filled bottles crashing through
their homes. And the cost. Enwright stopped buying bottled drinks altogether, she says,
after her kids began tearing through $20 or $30 worth of bottled drinks a week to
facilitate their habit.

Parents complain that they find half-filled bottles cluttering the house and throw them
out. “The other day, [my son] got a brand new Poland Spring bottle and poured half of
it down the drain,” says Jennifer Barry of Foxborough. “I was like, ‘Noooo!’”

CRAIG F. WALKER/GLOBE STAFF

Shane Bradley, 12, showed off his “bottle flipping’” skills while visiting the
home of James Tobin in West Roxbury.

And this is to say nothing of the countless bottles going airborne in middle school
lunchrooms across the region. “They flip the bottles all over the cafeteria,” says Peggy
Regan, a teacher at Arlington’s Ottoson Middle School. “Food gets spilled over, [the
bottles] end up on the floor. Our lunch room is busy and crowded. It doesn’t work well.”

To this, young flippers offer little more than a proverbial roll of the eyes.
“A lot of the popular trends right now my dad thinks are kind of stupid,” says James
Tobin, a seventh-grader from West Roxbury who has spent the past week attempting to
flip a bottle onto a wooden fence outside his family’s home. “But he doesn’t really know
what they mean, and he didn’t really live them, because [he’s from] the ’80s.”

Breaking down the bottle toss

The act of flipping a water bottle through the air to achieve a perfect, upright landing
on the table in front of you is part artform, part science.

ARTISTRY IN THE DELIVERY

The tosser can personalize how they serve the bottle during the “delivery,” right before
the “release.”

SCIENCE IN THE TOSS

1
Begin by holding a plastic bottle, filled a
third of the way up, from the top. At this
point, the center of mass lies with the water
at the bottom of the bottle.
Toss the bottle in a forward and upward motion. The bottle rotates, but most of the
water doesn't because it is free to move around within the bottle instead.

As the bottle continues on its downward path, the spin

of it is reduced and transferred to the heavier,
contained water. The “spin” refers to a concept known
as “angular momentum.”

The bottle soon reaches a point at which it is barely

spinning at all, and it falls straight to the surface
because of gravity. The weight of the water, as well as
the flat bottom of the bottle, contributes to the bottle
landing upright.

Whether bottle-flipping has the stamina to out-last the

slew of other recent fads — we’re looking at you,
Pokemon Go — remains to be seen.

Already, some schools have begun taking steps to temper the tossing. North Reading
Middle School issued a ban on the practice at the start of the school year. Other schools
also have warned students and parents that bottle-flipping would no longer be
permitted.

In the meantime, some desperate teachers have taken matters into their own hands.
Since the flip heard ’round the world, Senatore, now a freshman at the University of
South Carolina, has received a handful of messages from middle- and high-school
teachers asking whether he might consider personally urging students to holster their
bottles.

But while he’s sympathetic to their plight, he can’t bring himself to do it.
In a way, it would be like James Naismith coming out against basketball.
“Whenever I see a kid flipping a bottle, I know somehow I managed to influence that
kid,” Senatore said.

“I get a little smile every time I see it.”