National Lampoon released a 2007 comedy film called “Bag Boy” and tagged it “the greatest sports movie ever made … about grocery bagging!”

But competitive grocery bagging actually exists. Earlier this month, Redmond High School (RHS) senior Evan Harlan proved it’s no joke by winning third place in the 2009 National Grocer Association’s (N.G.A.) Best Bagger Competition at the Paris Las Vegas Hotel. Held in conjunction with the N.G.A. Annual Convention and Supermarket Synergy Show, the event capped a year-long, nationwide hunt for bodacious baggers.

Contestants were judged on their speed, bag-building technique, weight distribution between bags, style, attitude and appearance.

Harlan has been a courtesy clerk at the Redmond Ridge QFC store since October 2007, typically putting in about 20 hours per week, four hours per shift. He won the title of Washington State’s Best Bagger in October 2008 and placed seventh in the finals last year.

“I was a lot less nervous this year than last year,” he said. “Having been at the national competition in Las Vegas before, I realized that I needed to practice a lot more to get in to the top five finalists. All of that practice paid off.”

We asked him what kind of bagging tricks he learned from store managers and what things he figured out on his own.

“I learned from my very first training to put boxes on the sides, cans in the middle and crushables on top,” he explained.

That makes sense. No one wants to come home with cracked eggs or smashed bread.

Harlan added, “I learned on my own that most customers aren’t expecting a perfectly built grocery bag because they usually build terrible ones on their own.”

He said it’s harder to bag in plastic than paper “because you are tempted to just throw two items in each plastic bag and call it good. Also, plastic bags don’t stand up as well, so it looks like you didn’t bag them correctly. … I think about how to make the bags correctly and not very heavy, because (customers) have you re-bag them if they don’t like it. I’m also trying to get finished quickly so I can go back and work in the dairy.”

Customers sometimes have odd requests, Harlan said.

“Some weird ones were ‘plastic in paper in plastic’ and one lady wanted me to do double re-usable bags.”

Besides bragging rights, he won $500 for the state title and brought home $750 and a trophy from the third-place victory in Vegas. But bagging’s not his be-all and end-all.

His favorite class at RHS is astronomy and outside of school, he snowboards, plays Paintball and works on his car. He plans to attend a four-year college.

To see Harlan’s bagging finesse, visit http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7TH8gRmVKBg