When I first started yoyoing, people were literally learning tricks out of text descriptions in a paper newsletter.
Let’s pause for a moment to enjoy how old that makes me sound, and how completely bonkers it is that anyone would ever try to learn any physical skill that way.
There were also instructional VHS tapes, but they all sorta covered the same 10-20 tricks. Dennis McBride notably had multiple tapes in a series that got into more advanced stuff but it was still only a set amount of tricks, frozen in time. At the time, that seemed fine…almost no one was making new tricks. You learned the tricks that were out there, and then you spent a while trying to perfect them. Two-handed yoyo play was the pinnacle of skill at the time, and once you started working on it, well, it took a while to go from 5 reps of a trick to 30 reps of a trick so no one seemed to miss that new tricks weren’t coming out.
But everything changed in 1997. Ball-bearing yoyos became readily available to the general public, a kite store in Hawaii put together a team of ultra-talented kids to demonstrate yoyos in schools and stores across the world, and all hell broke loose. All of a sudden, in less than a year, yoyos became an international phenomenon in the largest yoyo boom since the 1960s.
But even then, if you didn’t have access to a live demonstrator, it was hard to learn tricks. There were only a handful of yoyo websites at this point and if you’ve never tried to download a 5 minute video on dial-up internet, well….let’s just say you didn’t miss out. It was excruciating. We would set downloads to run overnight so as not to tie up the one phone line in the house, only to wake up the next morning to some kind of time-out error message and have to try all over again. For a community of people with short attention spans and zero chill, it was a pretty excruciating time.
But in 2006, YouTube showed up. And while it was clunky and slow and heavily throttled in those early days, it was miles better than the mostly nothing at all that we had at our disposal before then. Anyone could use it, anyone could upload a video, and anyone could watch it relatively instantly. I joined YouTube in February 2006, and I remember marveling at the whole concept. It seems almost ridiculous now, that this should something worth freaking out over…but before we all had supercomputers in our pockets it was a pretty big deal. And for yoyo players, it was a game changer.
A lot of good came from this. There are a ton, and I mean a TON, of yoyo players now who if you ask how they got into yoyoing or how they learned, they’ll tell you it was YouTube. There are players who made their name and built their yoyoing career off their YouTube channels. The style of play I created, counterweight or 5A, owes a MASSIVE debt to YouTube for it’s popularity, and without the creativity of players like Tyler Severance and Miguel Correa and their Studio Sessions videos, I don’t know if 5A would have progressed nearly as much, nearly as quickly. We shared contest videos, clip videos, epic personal video projects, absurd joke videos (MORE FOG), and more. And for 10 years, YouTube was the gold standard for yoyo players to share video content online.
And in 2016, a photo-sharing platform that we’d all been fooling around with suddenly allowed us to upload 60-second video clips. Instagram had added video capacity in 2013, but only 15-second clips. Which was fun for sure, but definitely not enough time for anything more than a single trick or an ultra brief combo. But opening it up to 60-second clips meant we could now easily and quickly share yoyo tricks direct from our phone to the world in usually less time than it took to actually hit the trick. A glance at Instagram shows 1.2 million hits for #yoyo, 36.4k hits for #■■■■■■■■■■ and 112k hits for #trickcircle, the preferred hashtag for yoyo players sharing tricks videos. That’s 112 thousand videos of yoyo tricks, many unique and brand new, in five years. From one seismic shift to another, the simplicity and portability of Instagram once again gave yoyo players the world over the shortest possible path from idea to sharing.
So where does that leave us now? We are no longer wanting for a way to share our tricks…this is no longer a problem that needs to be solved. There isn’t really any room for a new platform to do it better, because “here’s a trick I just made up now you can all watch it cool that took like 20 seconds” is pretty much the pinnacle of instant sharing. But we’re yoyo players, and sharing isn’t the only thing we’ve built yoyoing around.
Yoyo contests have always been the cornerstone of the promotion of yoyo play because, as a species, humans are competitive as hell. And as a group, yoyo players are even more competitive than average. Yoyo contests have become the only viable lynchpin of any gathering of yoyo players. Attempts at yoyo “conventions” have never gone more than a few minutes without discussing the competition aspect, and even the briefly popular “spin & grill” meetups quickly turned into informal competitions with prizes for “Best Trick” or “Best Trick While Eating This Cheeseburger”.
Yoyo competitions started in the 1920s with a simple list of tricks that had to be performed, and a “loop off” tiebreaker….whoever can do the most loops wins. They stayed mostly the same up until the early 1990s, when the idea of yoyo freestyles came into play. A routine of tricks, created by the player, choreographed to music, and presented to judges to be scored on a predetermined criteria. As yoyoing itself grew more complicated, so too did the scoring system for these freestyles. Now we have an international governing body, the IYYF, that reviews the rules and scoring criteria each year, making changes as the tastes and priorities of the worldwide competitive yoyo community change and evolve. But for these competitions you’re talking about months, even years of preparation at the highest levels, the money and time to travel to them (in a year when we aren’t all grounded by a global pandemic), and the nerves to get on stage in front of hundreds of people and not suddenly forget or just plain miss all your hardest tricks. To scratch that competitive itch is still a clunky, difficult, and stressful affair. It’s pretty much the only aspect of yoyoing that technology hasn’t made easier for us yet, and even with the recent advent of online-based yoyo contests, it’s still a matter of creating and choreographing a routine, filming until you hit it cleanly, submitting it, and then a panel of people watching and judging and tabulating scores. Online yoyo contests take weeks to complete, which is not the greatest ratio of time:gratification.
All of this to say: this is why I’m working with the good folks at a new streaming app called Livee to bring head-to-head battle streaming to the yoyo community. Because after 25 years as a yoyo player, and being present for every major development in yoyoing in the last quarter century, I see instant competition as the next step in the development of yoyo contests and competition. And now that Livee has launched their battle feature and I’ve tried it a few times I can definitely say two things: online head-to-head yoyo battles are ridiculously fun, and I REALLY need to practice more.
Players being able to battle each other instantly, using absolutely any criteria they decide on, with instant judging from their friends and fellow players not only sounds like the logical next evolution of yoyoing online, but an absolutely stupid amount of fun. Head-to-head trick battles will probably become the norm, with friendly battles between friends taking up the most space and more formal events organized by various yoyo manufacturers and retailers coming in a close second. Players will be able to add a hashtag to their stream description before starting that will log their battle results in a specific leaderboard, allowing brands and stores to offer monthly bounties for the highest scoring competitors. Would a gift card to YoYoExpert incentivize you to spend a couple of weeks stomping your friends into oblivion in online battles? Sure, why not?! But even better are the opportunities for yoyo players to get creative. Team up with a friend and compete to see who can get knots out of their yoyo string the fastest. See who can loop the longest with their eyes closed without smashing themselves in the collarbone. Who can do the most stylish Rock The Baby? Who’s picture tricks are the best? Who has the coolest snap start? Create literally any criteria you want, and let your friends smash the screen to vote for the winner and then do it again and again. It’s yet another way for yoyo players to do what we do best: get creative, have fun, and compete amongst ourselves for fun and glory.
I hope you’ll join me on Livee for this exciting next step for yoyoing. The folks in charge there have really shown an interest in supporting the yoyo community long term, not just online but at in-person events once we’re able to have them again. Having that kind of support from a social media platform could really be huge for yoyoing, and I’m really excited to see where this takes us. I’ve curated some really fun 5A exhibition battles that will be happening on Livee at the end of the month, and I’ll be working with brands and retailers to host tons of competitions on the app moving forward, rewarding everything from the highest levels of skill to the most ridiculous things you can tolerate watching. It’s going to be a blast, and I can’t wait to see you there.
