Who or what inspired you to start yo-yoing?

General Yo-Yo
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In addition what makes you stick around?

Growing up I was an avid skateboarder. I dropped out of highschool, I broke a few bones, and I made a few girls mad in the pursuit of getting sponsored. Over the years I lost a lot of my close friends to drug use or suicide. I started getting older and the prospects of sponsorship faded away. I still love skateboarding and who I am because of it but I can’t really risk getting injured anymore. Not to mention my local skatepark always makes me a little too nostalgic. Covid started, I got laid-off, and I had a ton of unemployment money. I picked up some old astrojax and found the skill toy community. I wanted to yo-yo but was intimidated by the string and all the knots I was gonna’ get so I put it off. One fateful night of doom-scrolling I saw one of @edhaponik’s tricks on his porch and noticed a yo fade in his jeans. As a denim fan myself I thought that was the illest thing I’ve ever seen and decided to commit to yo-yoing no matter how many knots I got.

I’m going three years strong now and you guys are a big driving force in my continuance. I also work with “troubled” teenagers and seeing them get hyped on my tricks brings me the warm fuzzys. I’ve been thinking of my homies that passed away a lot lately and I’m forever grateful that I found YYE! You guys all rule so hard and I’m excited to hear about what got you all started!

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In 2015 I was talking to someone about childhood toys and yoyos were mentioned. I never thought about yoyos since 4th grade (I’m 57) when I had an Imperial and Butterfly but couldn’t do much with them. Within an hour I ordered an Imperial and trick book and was still baffled. I began ordering more yoyos and joined this Forum but deleted my account because it seemed kind of snooty. I ended up rejoining a year or two later and then deleted my account again. Joined again with many more yoyos and here I am with more than 200 yoyos and I’m not that bad skill-wise. I had an apprentice who advanced so quickly my head was spinning. Before he moved away he was more advanced than I ever will. Yoyos are my fidget toys. I enjoy them for 5-15 minutes at a time.

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I was bored out of my mind during quarantine. Somehow found Gentry’s 2019 worlds freestyle on youtube. Bought a velocity and started yoyoing in 2020.

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I found an old box of my Yomega’s that been tucked away for 20+ years around this time last year. I looked up some yoyo videos online and got hooked. Spent way too much time learning to trapeze with a saber wing instead of buying a modern yoyo. :sweat_smile:

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In between undergrad and graduate school i took a year off to go nuts, traveled, and came back 2 months before grad school started. I went to a party with my friends and i was not entertained, until i saw my friends Matthew in the corner throwing. I went over and asked him WTF? He pulled out an extra yoyo and gave me my first lesson… next morning i went to Toys-R-Us and bought a yomega fireball and a raider ll…i spent the next 2 months throwing with Matthew daily… after graduation i carried a Hitman everywhere i went but didn’t throw any new tricks until i got back into in mid 2019.

Just cause i love these guys here is Matt throwing @JEA86 perpetual last year when he came over for an evening.

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My mother got me this video and a yoyo from Cracker Barrel.

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TLDR; Some friends in my neighborhood got yo-yos and I thought it was awesome, so my buddy and I got super into it to and it took off from there. I joined a yo-yo club and met a ton of amazing people through yo-yoing, and had a ton of fun. Took a break for several years but back because I miss “yo-yoer me”.

Back in 8th grade a couple of kids in my neighborhood got some yomega mavericks, and me and one of my best friends at the time thought that was so cool, so we went to walmart and got some duncan mosquitos. We played through a few of those until the response pads stopped working or the string broke and got a few yomega plastics, and by the time we got our own yomega metals we were hooked. When I first found YYE, the tutorials and the video of Jensen Kimmit winning worlds in 2010 with a YYF Northstar were absolutely incredible to me and I just wanted to learn all the tricks and it was a blast!

What’s kept me going? The community and the creativity aspects. I found a yo-yo club nearish to where I grew up (shoutout to the Utah Yo-Yo Club, y’all are awesome!) and had a ton of fun going to meetups, learning tricks, and making new friends that also yo-yoed. Everyone was super nice to me and encouraged me with learning new tricks, filming trick videos, trying each others’ yo-yos and just talking and hanging out. It was a really great group of people and I just kept having great interactions with yo-yo players for the following years no matter where I went. I got super obsessed with yo-yoing from 8th grade until I graduated high school and it just became a super integral part of my life. I also just loved how creative and expressive I could be with yo-yos, and the active nature of it was just so fun for me, even though I wasn’t super into sports.

Graduating, moving to another country, coming back for college, getting married, COVID, and moving several times encouraged me to take a break from throwing that seriously. I still enjoyed it and would throw occasionally, and if something like a talent show came up I would practice a bunch and do it, but I never really found a solid group of people to throw with after graduating and moving a bunch.

So why am I back? I miss the community and I’ve started being a bit more active with my old group of yo-yo friends. I also binge watched worlds this year and it was just so much fun, and reminded me of how much I enjoyed yo-yoing, competitions, and learning new tricks. I also found myself getting sucked in to social media and gaming to the point of it being unhealthy for me. These have their place, and I do still enjoy gaming, but I didn’t like the “me” I was becoming, and I remembered that I was able to manage my emotions, have more genuine fun, make friends, and share smiles with people more when I was yo-yoing regularly. So recently, I made the conscious choice to come back to the community, get some new yo-yos (still working on this one), throw regularly again, and start learning tricks to prepare for competitions again.

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It all started with yoyo boom coming to Poland more or less 25 years ago and me getting 3$ plastic yoyo that could sleep for 20 sec and would come back on it’s own at the end of a sleeper.
BUT THEN this guy appeared on TV

and yoyos by Plamaxx and Proyo became available in shops. The boom ended fast, I stayed, fueled by old BAC videos, Sector Y and The Glass Lab.

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A Duncan Yoyo contest sometime in the late 50s.

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that is too rad and makes me so happy. it’s funny how something like a mark on someone’s jeans can connect w someone. thanks for sharing that (no jive in my pocket today, but i AM happy to see you).

for me it was mainly @DocPop 's experiment 004 video. i’d had yo-yos since i was a kid and played “seriously” during the boom, but it didn’t fully connect and i kept doing the same few things year after year. i watched that video and just saw limitless creative potential. it made me seek out the various forums and pick up some new throws. i’ve played literally every day since seeing it. we all owe somebody for catalyzing the initial reaction which set us on the path.

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Thanks for sharing that - I have very fond memories of that video and you sharing it with me.

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Scholastic book fair, it had a yomega brain? and a trick book. Got me hooked as a kid for like a solid year like most kids, then I stopped and didn’t throw again until around 2012 when I saw it on YouTube and order some throws again. But I was busy in military and didn’t stick with it long.

We moved last year and I saw my collection and I got me back to playing around with it. I was watching PNWR with the wife and she stopped watching tiktok to watch Aliyah 3A performance in full. Was the only one she truly watched and between my own enjoyment of the style and the way my wife watches it I knew it be the style I would commit too.

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Me along with 75% of kids under ten in 1998 did everything I could to get a fireball like the kid down the street had. Got ahold of a trick book and some strings from said kid down the street and probably kept at it for a year or so. Fast forward to around 2015, I’m christmas shopping at toys r us and see a good old fireball on the rack. Couldn’t pass up the $15 nostalgia endorphin bump. Played with it for months until I wanted to see if anything better performing was available… hello unresponsive metal yoyos blowing my mind with the design and performance displayed on youtube and online retailers. Bought a shutter and horizon with recommendations from this forum and it’s been a great time ever since.

What keeps me into it is pretty easy, I can always improve, learn something new or try a different style. New shiny things coming in the mail is pretty great too, god and Jeff Bezos knows how much I like online shopping. I step away from buying for a while here and there and I’ll go longer spells without throwing seriously but I always have a yoyo around to pick up and play with.

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I lived in Singapore during the 90s yoyo boom when Yohans and the gang arrived. I was in 3rd grade. I saw them on tv commercials and bought a Proyo II. “You can do it too!”, Yohans said. Weeks later, I saw them perform live and my parents bought me a TBB.

Eventually, the boom ended. It became difficult to get hold of yoyo strings, and I stopped yoyoing. There would be another mini-boom in the early 2000s, and I’d get a Proyo Ace II. But I’d eventually run out of strings again.

Around 2002, we went back to the Philippines and there was another boom with the Super Yoyo anime. I was in high school.
But alas, the boom ended and I ran out of strings again. The same thing happened during college with the Blazing Teens tv show. At that point, the hardest tricks I could do were 2.0 and Split the Atom. I’d eventually lose all my yoyos and stop yoyoing for more than 15 years.

Fast forward to August/September 2022. I think I stumbled upon a Gentry video on Youtube. I ended up buying a Skyva. I thought a Shutter was too expensive. Lol. I was amazed how much yoyos have changed, but they were too wide for my taste. So I bought a pair of Loop720s and watched Shu videos. I liked the profile of loopers, but I wanted to do string tricks too. “Wish I could get hold of yoyos from back in the day”, I thought.

Then, I found a couple of Playmaxx Proyo IIs online. I loved them! I could smell my childhood, if that makes sense. Haha. I’d soon stumble upon an old @edhaponik Proyo video. I didn’t know who Ed was back then, but I was amazed by what he could do with the Proyo. Soon, I found myself binge watching Ed’s Youtube videos. “This is the way”, I said to myself. I then watched @DocPop’s modern responsive tutorials, and soon found the Bandalores project with Ed, Doc, Drew, and Kyle. And the rest is history.

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One day my homie from school was doing simple tricks like rock the baby and around the world. I was all like “dang” and remembere that I had a yoyo in my closet that my great uncle gave me (I think) and brought one to school the next day and I guess I just clicked in.

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I had yo-yos when I was a kid and during the 90’s boom but I learned all the tricks in the little book that came with one and thought that was it. Skateboarding was my life for years until I had an injury and decided to give it up completely. I was looking for a new hobby. Around 14-15 years ago I bought a Duncan Bumblebee at a toy store because I hadn’t seen a yo-yo with a bearing before or thought about yo-yoing in years and I thought it would be fun to play around with. I looked up yo-yo tricks on YouTube and discovered modern yo-yoing. I thought it was similar to skateboarding in that you learn tricks and you can string them together with your own style and it became the new hobby I was looking for. I’ve been throwing ever since. I eventually came across Jensen Kimmitt. I really liked his style so I got a Wooly Marmot as my first unresponsive.

I’ve always thought what Ed Haponik was doing was cool. I’ve always listed him in my top 5 favorite players even though I only played 1A. I bought a TMBR Irving and some Proflys once and learned a few stalls and tricks but then sold/gave them away because I decided I didn’t want to take any time away from my 1A play. Around 7 months ago I bought a butterfly and started playing fixed axle because I was bored with 1A. I’ve really been enjoying playing fixed axle and learning the style and now it’s all I want to play.

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When I was young it was mostly my dad’s influence he had a roadster and I think a raider or fireball at some point. however what got me back into the hobby was my wife seeing me stare at a raider longingly after my dad passed and convinced me to go for it. From there it just stuck.

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One more for the Yo-Yo Man.

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Michael kurti and Tyler Severance came to my school when i was in 5th grade and they both did a yoyo performance. I bought a Spinstar and i have been yoyoing ever since.

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