The subject says it all, really.
I started because a close childhood friend of mine had a zombie that he carried around everywhere, doing tricks as we walked through town. I always looked up to him, so, after that, I purchase my first two YoYo’s, a Saber Raider and Patriot.
Why did you start?
This guy:
Well I will have to admit I got hooked onto yoyoing by the Super Yoyo boom a few years back. But what that did was it trapped me in two years of casual playing with those responsive yoyos before I finally broke out of it when I borrowed a YYJ Kickside from a friend.
YYF was holding summer yoyo classes at libraries near me. I almost didn’t start, since I just went to watch for the first day or two and had no interest in learning at the time.
It all (originally) started with a trip to the dentist and getting a cheap party favor yoyo as a prize “for being good” (for dealing with discomfort really). Realizing that its really limited I ended up getting a Duncan Imperial where I learned that “yoyos can actually do this cool spinning thing at the end of the string” (sleeping). The party favor yoyo had string tied to the axle.
A friend of mine got me a yoyo for my birthday (he already had been yoyoing for about 5 months) and gave me some links to where I should learn. I got right to it and became what I am today… obsessed with yoyos.
Back when I was in high school (late 90's early oughts) There was a major yoyo boom that took over the fad train like nothing ive ever seen.
Only thing was that at my school, no one was doing it until I brought my fireball in. I thought it was awesome and I could do all the usual “tricks.” Once the kids saw mine, it was all over, the fad took over our tiny speck of a town. Once I brought mine to school the domino line kept falling as more and more kids got em too.
I was into footabag (hacky sack most would call it) at that time and while surfing the first waves of the internet I found "high end" yoyos on a juggling supply store's website while looking for some nicer footbags than what I had.
There in this yoyo section on the site i found INSANE prices for a yoyo! 50 dollars?? 100 dollars?! What?! I dont even have a job yet, those would be impossible for me to get. One I recall being on top of the holy grail at the time was called a Silver Bullet. All metal looked like it was from space.
I looked at my lil dinky fireball and found discontent. I wanted better, but knew Id never be able to put that much money aside for a “toy” (I didnt understand the concept of a hobby at this time, nor what disposable income was).
I did however find a place where I could get a pair of Black Mamba 5 stars for not alot of money and did so. I could do looping with both hands and thought I was making progress. I tried shoot the moon and hit my face so hard i cried. 
I stopped looping that day, put the mamabas down and never thought of them again. No idea what ever happened to them.
Shortly after that I bought a proyo bumblee (yellow/black with matching string) that had this crazy cork looking imperial symbol on the inside (What is this scorcery!?) and a cool bearing. Man I could sleep that thing so good, started learning the break-away and then tried the trapeze.
Man I could NOT hit a trapeze to save my life! No matter how I tried, it was always a fail. I just couldnt do it. Maybe once out of 50 tries, but it just wasnt clicking.
I thought “I dont have what it takes, this is too hard for me” and put it down. Tossed that bumble bee in a box and moved on with my life forgot about yoyos pretty much entirely. This all played out in a few months and by then the fad was subsiding.
Fast Forward many years. Footbag was taking too much a toll on my body, needed to find lower impact activity. Took up juggling, contact juggling, poi, and buugeng over the years, spending time with each for a short time, before moving on to something else. Always chasing the dragon of flow.
Now here I am, over 30, working at a local hobby shop and we get a shipment of Yomega assotment yoyos. I see Xodus, The yo-to-pro series, maverick, and more! While I was putting them on display to sell I thought about "the good ole days."
I kept walking by them and stopping, gazing, mind drifting back to when I was in school. Curious as to what was available through the shop I looked into our systems to find what all we could order and found a company called YYF that we could get. I requested the boss to buy a handful of theirs including one called a shutter. With a price tag like that I was very curious to see what it was, and when it landed, I knew I was gonna buy it before it had a chance to make it to the shelf.
At this time I had no idea what non-responsive throws ever were, just that it had that butterfly shape finally. Read amazon reviews on it and it was mentions that it is a fantastic yoyo as long as you knew how to bind. Off to youtube I go to find out what a bind was. The video looked complicated. He says stuff like “all you do is this!” and his hands start swirling around and the yoyo is doing crazy loops this way and that and im WAY lost. ??? This was my first introduction to 1A.
It is too late, I already bought the yoyo, no way out. Have to learn. ;D
It took me a few tries but not long to get the bind. That day I just did the bind over and over. It felt SOOoo good! That metal yoyo, the power, the sleep times were unreal! I threw a break away and nailed that trapeze. Over and over again i nailed it! I cannot describe how good it feels and started making immediate and vast progress. I was hooked *bad* by the first bind. I have not been able to stop since. Its been close to 7 months now and im still going strong. ::)
Back in 5th grade, which was about 2011 or so, some of my friends at my afterschool started to yoyo. There was one of my friends in particular that was really good and he inspired me to get a yoyo. But them, most of them stopped yoyoing shortly after, while I kept on going.
Few different times growing up, I could always yoyo (like up and down) pretty well so they were never something I was against haha.
Saw a segment on Nickelodeon where it profiled a kid from ‘all that’, and he was decent if I remember correctly, doing stuff like double or nothing and it was the first time I seen string tricks. Thought it was very cool.
I did not take yoyoing seriously until around 8 years later, but I don’t think I ever would have if I hadn’t of had my little yoyo obsession as a kid haha
I was at the Duncan booth in downtown Disney and James reed,Anthony Rojas,and Logan Willis were there and I thought they were so cool so I bought a bumblebee and then went back the next week and bought a flip side. I’ve been doing it for almost 2 years now and James and anothony are still my favorite players, and not just because they got me started…it’s because the are amazing!
Basically for me it was part of my Prison release program diversion therapy.
I was in for life for being a cereal killer. But the Warden pardoned me after 4 hours when Kellogg’s dropped the charges.
After consulting with their Profession Image Experts; they felt it would Bring them too much Negative publicity to give me such a harsh punishment for beating 12 boxes of Corn Flakes to death with a wooden spoon from Aisle 17(left side, 3rd shelf down, 3 feet west of the end cap with the SpongeBob lunch boxes).
The Judge suggested I drop my favorite pastime of sharpening Axes and get my mind on something else.
Once I was told a yoyo could be used as a weapon, I knew that would be a good toy for me.
I have found over the past 17 years that messing with yoyo has really centered my focus.
And so far, has helped me keep my promise to myself to Never Kill Again.
But sadly my entire family has made me an Outcast because they are all deathly allergic to yoyo string.
It all started when I was a little kid still in China, the show Blazing Teens was very amusing to me, with all the special effects. I started yoyoing for like 6 month during that time, i remember I was in 3rd grade. I stopped yoyoing for 7 to 8 years because it did not get me in to it, I was blinded bt simple tricks and not the world yoyo scene. In 2012 December, it all started with this video.
I was soooo amazed, and brought a Duncan Metal Drifter and then kept going. Fast forward to 3 years here today, Marcus koh is my favorite yoyoer and my inspiration, but Issac Sam for me started all for me. In 2015 BAC, i finally met him. 
What got me into the yoyo scene was the NED show. When I first saw it, I got my parents to buy me a Cosmic Spin, But I didn’t bother learning how to yo, & I broke it eventually. https://youtu.be/0A7UxpSjVoc
Then, the NED show came back to my primary school, & I begged my mom to buy me a NED auto return yoyo, she eventually gave in. At that time, I finally got into the yoyo & started learning all kinds of tricks. From that point on, I got only Yomega yoyos. I got myself a Glide back in 2013, I also happened to lose interest in that same year.
But once when my mom grounded me from the internet, I decided to finally get back into the yoyo, & that’s how I got myself a Czech Point as my first non Yomega throw. So yeah, that’s how I’m here.
FYI, Both of my NED throws are broken.
Fried came in one day and pulled out his yoyo and did a few tricks. Let’s just say I ordered my first yoyo that night
Has the NED show got any of you guys into yoyos?
It started in 1995/1996 when I was in kindergarten. There was someone in front of school selling different kinds of cheap toys (those kinds of sellers are pretty common here), and pretty much all my friends are buying these wooden things called yoyos. I’m interested so I got one too just to realize that I can’t catch it back like how my friends does. Luckily my dad knows how to do that throw down and catch thingy and taught me, it takes some time but eventually I did. After the fad went down, it was left to dust.
Fast forward a few years, there were times in my elementary school where the local yoyo fad comes and goes, it always depends on what kind of toys people in front of school are selling really, however, it was all wooden yoyos. One thing though, I didn’t really think about it back then, but I somehow like it more than other kids in my school. I find myself keep playing it and eventually learn some tricks other than throw down and catch (gravity pull). I “made” a cool trick that later I discovered is called forward pass. However, I still have no idea how some kids are able to sleep their yoyos for a few seconds.
One time in elementary school, there was a Super Yoyo boom and cheap plastic yoyos show up everywhere. I got one and learned some simple tricks on it. I still play it even when I was in junior high, to the point the yoyo broke and it has been reglued several times before it just absolutely can’t be fixed. It was all auto return, as far as I’m concerned.
I looked for my old wooden yoyos and started making strings for it out of sewing threads, and finally understand how to do sleeper on wooden yoyos to do tricks like rock the baby, eiffel, and stuff.
On senior high one day I was bored and look for random stuff on the internet, searched something like “yoyo master”, to find myself blown away Shinji’s and Hiroyuki’s World’s 2005/6 and then my life settled.
I NEED YOYOS RIGHT NOW.
It was difficult at first, for like a year I can’t get my hands on a yoyo, until at one point Blazing Teens showed up and I bought my first bearing yoyo from Auldey which seemed to be Saber Raider bootleg, and a FHZ bootleg. Also discovered Yoyonation and Yoyoexpert and then grew faster than ever.
Here I am now seven years since I got my first bearing yoyo.
I first got into yoyoing in the early 2000’s when Duncan came to my elementary school and did some yoyo mail order stuff with a demo and all that, and I was so amazed by it. I remember that my parents couldn’t afford to really get me a yoyo at the time, and I was actually more bummed because I wanted the cool special professional yoyo glove that you needed to be good at yoyoing.
fast forward to Christmas that year, my parents get me this Tiger E-Yo
I played that thing so much, I actually had to do battery changes on it. I even ran out of string and started using construction twine to play, which wasn’t a big deal since all I could do was the gravity pull.
Inevitably, I lost interest for one reason or another, and moved on before really learning anything other than how to do lots of gravity pulls in a row.
Fast forward to 12/26/14
I buy a Duncan Butterfly from Academy for $1.95 since I remembered the Duncan show, and while playing with it on the walk over to ToysRUs, I decided it was so fun, that I was gonna look for a cooler yoyo in there. I was staggered by the price of some of the things they had in there (who in their right mind would pay $25 for a yoyo, amirite?) but I wound up getting the $10 pack with the ProYo and Speed Beetle in it. I still have those, and play them sometimes. My desire to learn tricks came after I started looking at some “Professional” yoyos on YouTube and saw that they all had really cool yoyos. Well, since I only knew Duncan, I decided that I needed to search out who carried the best Duncan around, and found a couple sites to choose from. It actually turns out that I went with YYE to buy a YoYoJam SR71 just because it had the best price for a YYJ. I found the “learn” section while I was here, and the forum section as well, and started trying to do something more than the gravity pull. So first things first, I learned the forward pass, and it just snowballed from there, lol
Black friday 3 years ago,i was at the mall at 3 am,and went to a puzzle and board games store and they had a yomega brain for sale,and for years i always wanted to buy a yoyo,cuz when i was like 9-10 years old i got obsessed with this yoyo and how to yoyo book i got at a book fair,and when i saw that brain in that store that night,then played with it for like 2 weeks until my lil bro snapped the string,so i went online for string,and its been history ever since the interwebs opened me up to our community.
I saw footage from the Western Canadian championships on the news and was blown away. I ordered my first yoyo the next day.