JACKSONVILLE BEACH, Fla. — Some of the greatest athletes in the world call the First Coast home.
We have Olympians who have won gold medals in the Summer and the Winter Games. We also have some top football and baseball players too.
But there's another athlete who spun his way into a Hall of Fame.
Alone in his own corner of the beach, Paul Kenny is in his element.
"This one's got some high risk to it," says Kenny as he gets ready to hurl multiple Frisbees into the air. The Jacksonville Beach native says that his home is the epicenter for Freestyle Frisbee enthusiasts.
"This is the best freestyle beach in the world," says Kenny. "What you end up getting is gravity pulls it down, and the wind pulls it back and because it's on a beach you get this slight incline, and it creates this air squeeze so the disc floats nice on the beach."
Kenny used the environment at Jacksonville Beach to create multiple tricks like the "Machine Gun" and can even combine multiple tricks at the same time.
He is more than a weekend warrior with a disc. Kenny has won eight World Championships and is heading to Milan for this year's World Championships in September. He was also recently elected into the Freestyle Disc Hall of Fame and will soon be a contemporary of people he considers to be greats of the game.
"It's unbelievable with the people who are so historical with the sport in the hall of fame and to be able to be mentioned in that crew of people," says Kenny. "Instead of legends and heroes, they're friends."
And while he's been spinning the disc for decades, his background as an engineer fueled what became far more than a hobby.
"Engineering made me a better freestyler and freestyle made me a better engineer because I take the technical merits of engineering and apply it here," says Kenny. "It made me a better engineer to be able to trust my creative process."
A creative process that led dozens of other freestylers from around the planet to join him in Jacksonville Beach for a reunion every year.
"It's such a lifetime love and passion that when you see someone freestyling it doesn't matter where you see them in the world, you know each other," says Kenny. "We're a small community, but we're everywhere."
And now those that join Kenny get to be in the company of a Hall of Famer.