Have a great profile for everyone today from our own Robin Strickin @nightshadow with Sengoku and Stricklin Strings!!!
Absolute insanely talented and interesting individual. Hope you enjoy!!
What got you into throwing, how did you find the hobby?
The NED yoyo guys! They came to my school and left their mark by selling $10 yoyos to over half the kids. Soon everyone on the playground was learning the forward throw. The kids who could do the best tricks were like royalty. Young me decided I wanted to be the best yoyoer on the elementary school playground, and got to work!
What is your goal in the next year for yourself, personal or professional?
I have a few, but some big ones are
1.) I would like to do well in my upper division physics course load this year, as I’ll be jumping into some of the “big boy” stuff. I’m a little terrified!
2.) My shot to have my name on a medical research paper is also going to come up this year, which has been a goal of mine for 2 years. A paper I’m on is being submitted for peer review this summer. Fingers crossed!
How did you come about with the idea for Stricklin strings?
A quote from the great car maker Horacio Pagani! (“If you cannot buy it, build it”). If you’d like to hear me yap about the strings more more, you can check out my thread on them, but in short, I found myself always wanting strings that were
- Softer
- THICKER
- Higher coil count per inch
I realized I really couldn’t get what I had in mind unless I made it myself!
If you could only have one yo-yo for the rest of your life what would it be?
Something titanium! Just for the durability of the bearing seat. After all, this thing is going to have to last me for the rest of my life!
I would probably go for something like the Sengoku Ieyasu, or Oxygen Hyperion. Both performance beasts.
If it is going to be the only yoyo I ever use, it had better be able to handle a lot, because I know I’m going to keep trying to get better.
What’s your favorite trick?
Not really a trick, but more of an element. I have always been drawn to that thing where you spin a string around, and it untwists really fast on its own. When I was little, it was a huge mystery to me how they were done, and I knew that if I could just figure one trick with a spinny string out, I would do it all the time.
Now, I stick them in my tricks constantly!
Here is a compilation: (in chronological order, so the general trend is they get harder as you watch)
What’s the trick that gives you the hardest time?
Tech stuff. I never liked the way it looked, and the effort to payoff ratio of working for weeks to get one part of the spiderweb to cross behind the other just isn’t there for me.
I suppose the reason that I never really did tech well was that my heart wasn’t in it.
What’s your favorite yo-yo of all time?
Not sure, definitely something undercut. Haven’t tried the new Sengoku Bishamonten, but from what I know, it will probably be that!
What’s the most meaningful throw you have?
My Yoyofactory Shutter. It is the yoyo I used to gain most of the skill I have today. Young me worked towards my goals of mastery for many hundreds of hours on it. It was the first tool I used in a really disciplined way.
What’s your worst habit with yo-yos?
Focusing too much on perfecting one trick for weeks, rather than moving on to a new one
What kind of things are you into outside of yo-yos?
I’m an undergraduate student, so over half my time is devoted to academics, but when I’m not in class or studying:
I have been grabbed by aviation, I’m working towards my pilot’s license. I fly 2-3 times a week. My landings are getting smoother!
(I’d like to include a quick side note on the subject of aviation, because I don’t like the idea of coming off as an entitled kid who has tens of thousands of dollars to throw at waltzing into airplanes.
The only reason that I’m able to fly is because UC Davis has a tiny airport on their land, and has been running a micro flight school since the 40s. When I finished my pre-med studies at UC Berkeley, I submitted an application to UC Davis as an applied physics major.
As part of their acceptance, they agreed to let me skip the 2 year waitlist for flight school, and to fund ~100 hours flight hours.
So in short, I got exceptionally lucky. I will always be grateful to the universities of California for the opportunities they have given me.)
Anyway, continuing to answer the question:
Another interest of mine is the medical research I was lucky enough to be selected to assist with at Dr. Paul Sieving’s lab in UC Davis medical school. He has a fascinating background, and it has been an incredible job over the last year, a real window into how research on that level is conducted.
I am especially interested in Aerospace/aviation medicine, and look forward to attending the annual conference this May.
I play the violin (and spent most of my late preteens through high school wanting to do it as a career!)
I also try and keep up with a few topics in anthropology, especially those related to egyptology. During my time as a premed student, my medicine related major was biological anthropology. A bi-product was a solid liberal arts foundation, and exposure to the field of anthropology for a few years. I try to carry these historical interests/perspectives with me today, even when surrounded by physics and engineering material.
I am also a part time firefighter, on shift 72 hours a month.
What fictional character best fits who you are?
Gimli the dwarf (see my favorite books/movies).
Staunchly loyal, and usually approaches problems head on by bashing on them until they (hopefully) yield.
Favorite restaurant and order?
La Bonne Bouche in St. Louis. Honestly, their croissants are incredible.
Favorite movie and or book?
Movies: A Philadelphia story, The Sting, The Iron Giant, Lord of the Rings trilogy
Book: Lord of the Rings trilogy
If you could wake up tomorrow and magically have the skills from one player who and what would it be?
Honest answer: there is a player I met on the forums who is now a friend of mine who was an airforce pilot. I’d like to have his skills behind the yoke.
What’s your favorite memory from your time in the hobby ?
I have a few:
Finally mastering boingy-boing
My first yoyo competition
Getting sponsored. The culmination of many hours of planning and practicing.
When Julio finally caved and gave the green light to an undercut Sengoku model
How has the community changed since you started? Where do you want it to go?
I’ve seen the community change a lot since I started. It’s grown in a lot of ways, but shrunk in the areas I used to think of as Meccas. Like Chico.
Of course, the skill level at contests in getting off the charts. This is cool to see! Sometimes I miss the days of 2013 or so when things were a little less competitive, and folks could still win with funky/cool ideas and routines that were less dialed in. But many players today are also such a joy to watch.
I have also watched the world at large get more divided in recent years, and some of this has appeared to seep into even the yoyo scene occasionally.
Where I’d want the community to go is in more of a direction of focusing on what matters, the fact that we all like to yoyo together, and less on the divisive/darker issues of today. The world outside may be in turmoil, but this community can still get together and discuss rim weight, response pads, and how the heck Mir Kim hit that horizontal 5.0 hook.
If you never picked up a yo-yo - what would life look like now?
That’s hard to say. Yoyo was my first exposure to profound motivation, and working towards goals in a disciplined way. It was great for me because it initially presented as a fun hobby for a young child (wanting to do cool tricks on the playground), but had enough depth for me to learn how to work hard, and what it felt like to want to be great at something very badly. I owe the mentality I started developing with yoyo for most of the success I’ve had thus far.
Advice/ words of wisdom to new players?
Learn to practice well! Figure out a specific element that is troubling you, and isolate it. Do it repeatedly over the course of days and weeks, and it WILL yield. Better practice leads to faster progress, and less frustration.
It is easy to plateau for years at a time (I see many folks that still have newbie looking breakaways after 5+ years of throwing), but if you are consistent (and focused!) in your practice, you will progress more than you might think, even on as little as 30 minutes a day.
Whats you want to tell the world?
I think its important not to live passively. I am well aware of how naive I am at this point, but there have been some pieces of advice I’ve gotten from folks farther along in life that really made sense to me.
When I was in fifth grade, I won an essay contest and got to speak to an astronaut. One of the things he said to me was: “Find things you love doing, and are useful to the world. And then get really good at them.”