Cory Black knows what it means to keep a lot of balls in the air. For years, that was a metaphor: as a software engineer at Facebook, he was managing complex projects, deadlines, and the usual chaos of tech life. But eventually he decided to make it literal. Black, a 30-year-old from Bellevue, Washington, is a graduate of the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington, and he spent three and a half years working at Meta’s Seattle office, building tools for content monetization and navigating the demands of a prestigious tech career. All the while, though, he was secretly (and sometimes not so secretly) practicing something far more unusual. Today, he is one of the world’s premier soccer freestylists, a performer who can make a ball dance on his feet, knees, chest, and head in ways that seem to defy physics. He left the stability of a tech salary, the familiarity of engineering culture, and the promise of a conventional career to run away and join the circus. It sounds like a fable, but it’s his life. And recently, he proved how far that leap of faith has taken him, earning a bronze medal at the 2026 International Jugglers’ Association Championships in Fort Wayne, Indiana, competing alongside elite performers from Japan, Taiwan, and across the United States.
His path started in a very ordinary place: a backyard, a soccer ball, and a dad who knew exactly how to motivate a teenager. When Black was 14 and playing youth soccer, his father challenged him to juggle the ball 100 times with his feet for $100. To a kid, that felt like a fortune. So Black practiced obsessively for weeks, and he earned the money. But something unexpected happened along the way. What began as a bet turned into a doorway. He started watching trick tutorials on YouTube, then teaching himself increasingly difficult moves, and soon he was hooked. “Then I just started learning some tricks on YouTube and fell in love with learning the next one and next one, and figured out that it was a sport all to itself,” he later recalled. He quit traditional soccer in high school to focus entirely on freestyle, a decision that might have seemed risky to outsiders but felt inevitable to him. At 16, he traveled to Los Angeles for his first U.S. Championships. Later, he made his way to the World Championships in the Czech Republic. Unlike playing on a field, soccer freestyle operates more like a breakdance battle. Competitors take the stage head-to-head, spinning, kicking, and balancing the ball in mesmerizing sequences, trying to impress a panel of judges with creativity, difficulty, and style. It was a world apart from the structured formations and team tactics of regular soccer, and it gave Black a way to express himself that felt both athletic and artistic.
When it came time to think about college, Black followed his older brother to the University of Washington, where he dove into computer science at the Allen School. He was genuinely good at it, and he enjoyed the intellectual challenge. But in his free time, he kept practicing tricks, often alone in parks or gyms, chasing the next skill. At that point, freestyle still didn’t feel like a realistic career. Most of his heroes were talented performers who scraped by on occasional corporate gigs for brands like Nike or Adidas. It was a passion, not a plan. So he did the sensible thing: after an internship in Silicon Valley, he accepted a full-time software engineering position at Facebook’s South Lake Union office in Seattle. For three and a half years, he worked on tools that helped creators monetize content, collaborating with product managers and designers, attending meetings, reviewing code. It was a good job by almost any measure. But juggling never left his side. He kept juggling balls on his desk. He tried to teach his teammates how to juggle during breaks. After hours, he would practice high tricks in the office lounge, using the empty space and high ceilings to perfect his craft. It was a strange double life, but he made it work. Then one day, while training at a Seattle circus school, he met a former Cirque du Soleil choreographer. Black showed him some of his moves, casually, not expecting much. The choreographer’s response changed everything: “Hey, you can make this into a circus act.” Black had never even imagined that possibility. But suddenly, a door swung open. He saw that it was possible to work with a circus, live with a circus, and build a recurring way to support himself. The idea was no longer a fantasy; it was a plan.
So Black made the leap. He left Facebook and spent six to eight months building a full, stage-ready routine with his choreographer. That meant teaching his body to combine traditional hand-toss juggling with elite soccer freestyle, a rare hybrid that took years to develop. To make his savings last, he slept on his brother’s floor in Seattle for a year and a half. It was not glamorous. There were long days of practice, moments of doubt, and plenty of dropped balls. But eventually, he landed his first circus contract. That led to two years on the road with Flynn Creek Circus, living in a caravan and performing as a featured act. It was a nomadic existence, completely different from the orderly life of a software engineer. But it was also exhilarating. When that chapter ended, Black pivoted again, this time to performing as a solo artist. He booked corporate events, private shows, and local festivals, slowly building a reputation and a network. Then came a breakthrough moment: Seattle hosted FIFA World Cup matches in the summer, and Black found himself in the perfect place at the perfect time. Over six weeks, he performed 28 separate shows across the city, including fan events at Pacific Place Mall and outside the stadium before all six games. It was a whirlwind, and financially, it transformed his year. He made most of his income for the entire year during that stretch. The risk had paid off, not just in artistic fulfillment but in practical, real-world success.
One of the most interesting parts of Black’s story is how much his engineering background has shaped his approach to performance. At first glance, coding and circus arts seem to belong to different universes. But Black sees surprising parallels. Both engineers and jugglers are drawn to complex patterns, especially patterns that can be described with numbers. Juggling notation, for example, uses specific sequences to represent throws and catches, and mastering them requires a kind of mathematical intuition. “If you go to local juggling clubs anywhere, there’s an unusually high amount of software people and engineers,” Black said. That observation is backed by a certain truth: the people who love juggling are often the same people who love untangling difficult problems, whether those problems are in code or in motion. Black explains it simply: “Part of it is just being able to tackle hard, frustrating problems. If you haven’t gotten used to banging your head against a wall until you get something, you’re going to give up fairly easily.” That stubbornness is central to his success. Juggling five balls in the air, or learning a new freestyle trick, is a lesson in incremental progress. You fail. You try again. You fail differently. Eventually, your muscles learn what your mind could only imagine, and the trick becomes part of your vocabulary. It’s not so different from debugging a stubborn piece of code, where the solution only emerges after hours of patient, methodical work.
These days, Black has no interest in returning to the tech world, even though he occasionally leans on his engineering skills for side projects. He broke his foot in December, which slowed down his performing, and during that time he took on what he calls “software adjacent” work. He has also helped build websites for circus friends, using his technical knowledge to support his new community. But the idea of going back to a desk job holds little appeal. “Right now, I don’t plan on going back at all,” he said. He also has a wry awareness of how much the industry has changed: “I don’t know what the landscape looks like after AI has kind of gone through everything.” It’s a remark that carries both humor and relief. While the tech world is busy trying to understand artificial intelligence, Black is busy perfecting a routine that is deeply, irreducibly human. He has found a way to turn his childhood obsession into a life, and he has done it on his own terms. There are no code reviews on the circus stage, no sprint planning meetings, no quarterly goals. There is only the ball, the body, the audience, and the moment. For Black, that is more than enough. He is perfectly content to keep debugging physical tricks, learning from each failure, and celebrating the occasional perfect run. On stage, the only glitches are the drops, and even those become part of the performance. Every juggler knows that a dropped ball is not a failure; it’s just part of the process. And Cory Black, former software engineer, now world-class performer, is living proof that sometimes the most beautiful code is written with your feet.
