Kendric Washington was in his sophomore year of high school when he saw his first sign spinner. Or at least, his first real sign spinner—someone who didn’t stand placidly in place twirling a sign around, but injected a kind of athleticism and performance into the task that immediately captivated the now-22 year old.

“I saw some guy sign spinning on the corner, and at first glance I fell in love and said, ‘this looks amazing,'” says Washington, who grew up in Hyattesville and currently lives in D.C. “I walked up to this guy and said, ‘Yo this is amazing, how do you do this?’ And he said it’s pretty easy and simple, and he started training me.”

The moment would prove providential. It began Washington’s employment at AArrow Sign Spinners, a national guerrilla marketing company that hires young people (overwhelmingly young men) and trains them in the art of athletic, competitive sign spinning. And it would lead, eventually, to two first place titles at the World Sign Spinning Championships, hosted by the same company in Las Vegas every year. Last weekend, Washington won his second title in three years.

“I can tell you what it takes to become the best sign spinner,” Washington says. “It takes hard work and dedication. I’m not going to sugarcoat this. Every year that I won the championship, I literally trained all year. I would work out, I would go running just to build my stamina, and I would work really hard not just outside of work but at work too just to keep my mind really sharp and focused.”

The competition in Vegas is a high stakes event in the world of AArrow sign spinners. Competitors have to qualify by performing well in a series of regional contests, and then they have to face off against 75 to 100 spinners from across the country (and a few international spinners, too). There are three rounds, two heats in each round; each time, the spinners take the floor and perform a short routine of their best tricks set to music. A panel of judges eliminates chunks of competitors each round, until there are just ten competitors left.

“The finals is where all the pressure is at. The top ten sign spinners really battle it out to see who can get first place,” says Washington. “It was definitely a very intense competition this year, and [everybody] brought their best, so I want to say I was frightened in a way.”

Turns out there was no real need for fear. After disappointing himself with a fourth place finish last year (as the defending 2018 champ, no less), Washington took home first prize. “I was very ecstatic,” Washington says.

In some way, sign spinning feels like a fated calling for Washington. He was a skateboarder in high school with pretty developed hand-eye coordination, and he was also in his school’s JROTC program, where he took a liking to spinning rifles as a part of the exhibition team. When he saw that sign spinner on the corner at fifteen, he saw something he could learn. “High school is a weird time where you don’t know exactly what you want to do, but you have the feel for what you want to do,” he says.

His sign spinning mentor trained him for upwards of two months as a teenager, Washington says (AArrow generally expects their sign spinners to know a few tricks before sending them out on jobs). Then he started getting sent out for shifts all over the region, standing on busy street corners and working to draw eyes to whatever advertisement happened to be plastered to the arrow he was wielding. He learned how to handstand, how to hold the sign between his feet and then pop it back into his hands, how to handle the giant cardboard arrow so deftly it looks like it’s attached to his body by an invisible string.

Sign spinning was his part time job through high school, and after high school it became more than that.

Washington considers sign spinning his career, one that he plans to follow as far as it will take him. He says he’s been featured in music videos, and in 2018 he was featured in a video for the New England Patriots. In summer 2019, he was part of a team of sign spinners that traveled to Iowa to spin signs for John Delaney’s presidential campaign. 

There are some questions, of course, about whether the world of competitive sign spinning is a real athletic pursuit or a kind of crafty strategy on the part of AArrow’s owners to boost morale for what is often seen as low-prestige, tiring, dead-end work. As the Washington Post’s Perrry Stein pointed out in 2017, academics often call this move “job crafting.”

AArrow “has taken what seems to be a monotonous, low-skilled job and helped give it a sense of identity,” Seth Kaplan of George Mason University told the outlet that year. Stein pointed out that, at the 2017 Vegas championships she attended, most of the crowd watching the stunts was employed by AArrow, and it often had the feel of a company retreat. (Max Durovic, one of the founders of AArrow, told Stein that the culture of the company naturally sprouted from the employees themselves).

Sneaky HR strategy or not, Washington feels purpose doing it, and he has no plans to stop. In fact, he’s gunning for a another first place at next year’s World Sign Spinning Championships. “I’m going to try to go back to back,” he says.