Someone recently asked me the origin of the A divisions and I realized it would probably be a fun topic for the forum here! I had to reach out to multiple people to finally get to the bottom of it!
Turns out - originally yoyo contests were just yoyo contests without ‘style’ divisions - because when you got good at yoyos everyone who was any good was doing looping tricks with two yoyos. So instead the divisions were designated A and B division = Championship vs Beginner
As the No Jive 3 in 1 became popular and people started getting really good at doing actual string tricks they needed to distinguish string tricks from looping - so 1A and 2A divisions were born for 1 yoyo and 2 yoyos.
Eventually two long spinning yoyo tricks were born thanks to Mark McBride and Steve Brown (amongst others) - Mark and others joked they would just ‘add’ the 1 and the 2 together to make the style 3A since it was a combination of the two.
Fast forward and eventually offstring came about - Hironori Mii who helped popularize offstring thought 4A was perfect designation because the word FOUR sounds like the word YO in Japanese - and so it sounds like the ‘Yo division’ in Japanese. lol. So it therefore continued the numbering after 3A for 4A and 5A.
If memory serves, it was Alan Nagao (THP) who originally conceived of the A and AA designations. The Raider, Cherry Bomb, and eventually Renegade spring to mind as drivers of the 1a revolution - but of course the Renegade IS a heavy plastic bearingized No Jive lol.
Meanwhile 0a was never a “division” - just a way to refer to the basics which weren’t at 1a/2a level. What’s ironic about the No Jive is that it’s also been one of the key vehicles in the resurgence of fixed axle popularity. So while once it was a technological advance propelling the eventual 1a revolution to dominance, it’s also been seen as a retro alternative to modern 1a.
Also ironic is the fact that I literally just typed up a blog post about kind of reclaiming “0a” as a means of describing modern responsive tricks! (The poetical bit at the beginning is something I did for Doc Pop’s new StringBurn Zine.)
I also always think it’s interesting that 5a yo-yo design has been patented, and that the style of play is effectively moderated by Duncan, with the patent set to expire in 2020. It will be interesting to see what happens, since that’s a hugely creative style which has suffered from a lot of attrition.