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Three years ago today my life was forever changed.
Not in a bad way, in fact on this day in 2014 was the first time that I ever felt that my hard work and dedication to something had finally paid off. All of the hours I had spent working on perfecting something, the sleepless nights spent studying, practicing and innovating had all been worth it.
Okay so let me explain. From the beginning.
I don’t talk about YoYoing a lot, but it’s probably the single most important community and platform that I have ever been a part of and has singlehandedly influenced everything that I have been a part of since I first picked one up. In August of 2009 I got hurt. I used to be a three sport varsity athlete in high school - I played soccer, basketball and ran track from elementary school on, and I was pretty good. But during a scrimmage in the preseason of my Junior season of soccer, I got cleaned out by our goalie during a breakaway, landed a little weird with the full weight of my body on one foot, rolled, and tore every ligament in my right ankle.
At first I thought I had broken it. But as I limped off the field, I realized that I could still move it, so it must be fine. About five minutes later it was black and purple, and the torn ligaments had started to ball up above my ankle - I could see them beneath my skin. I was lucky it wasn’t broken, but a few x-rays that night revealed that the damage included chunks of bone where the ligaments attach had been ripped away. It wasn’t as bad as it could have been, and I didn’t know it then, but that moment changed the entire trajectory of my life. I had always focused on sports growing up. I was fine at school, but I was always playing something, always had a practice to get to after school, always had something to be spending my time practicing. All of a sudden, that time in my life was over. I still played during my senior year after my ankle was healed enough to hold up, but I was a shadow of my former self, and was left to figure out what to spend my time focusing on from there on out.
My friend Clint had been playing with yoyos for years. He had always asked if I wanted to learn some tricks, just mess around and try it out, and at this point I finally caved and said yes. I could barely move my foot, and I was going stir-crazy just sitting around playing video games, so the thought of using my hands to do something interesting was pretty appealing. He let me borrow one and taught me how to bring it back up to my hand, and then left me to figure out the rest of the basics on my own with the help of YouTube.
So I did. I spent the next six months just absorbing information and practicing here and there and really having fun with it. I began to develop a taste for certain tricks and certain other yoyoers’ styles, similar to how one might get into skateboarding or something. I started to buy and trade YoYos online, looking for ones that fit my hand perfectly, felt good on the string and were able to do the kinds of tricks that I wanted to learn. Somewhere along the way I attended my first contest with Clint and my friend JT up in Seattle - the Pacific Northwest Regional. I remember seeing Gentry Stein and Zach Gormley perform on stage there, two future world champions - though we didn’t know it then, and thinking “damn, I want to do that someday.”
My first year of college I started to play YoYo quite a bit more. Intramural sports and partying fell out of favor and I began to spend a lot more time alone in my room, watching videos and practicing new tricks that I had just started to make up myself. I look back on this time as my hibernation period - I completely fell in love with yoyoing, and I spent hours each day grinding. I skipped class, I skipped meals, I bailed on my friends, I didn’t see my family for weeks, all because I was completely engrossed in this little toy and the world that it opened up to me. I began to connect with the online community more, making friends with others who were a big part of the scene. And biggest of all, I began to make videos.
At first they were terrible. I didn’t show them to anyone, but YoYo videos were the reason that I had gotten as far as I had, and I had just gotten a Canon T3i, so I wanted to start making stuff myself. I probably uploaded ten different videos to YouTube that have been private for four years and have never seen the light of day during this time. But it was all good practice, and it let me figure out the proper way to light the scene, the best ways to position the camera and the basics of video editing. At some point along the way JT and I started coming up with new ideas for videos, aided by our friend Ibs who was going to OSU at the time as well. The house I was living in then was terrible - super messy, poorly kept and overcrowded - but it had the BEST basement. So we kind of took it over for our video projects. We lugged some old vintage speakers down there and hooked them up to a stereo so we had music. We brought down some old construction lights that we had found and used them to light up one of the corners for tricks. That barebones setup was sketchy as hell, but we loved it and it gave way to one of the most important media series I have ever been a part of: Basement Sessions.
Basement Sessions wasn’t really anything crazy. It was typically just a bunch of guys playing with toys in the basement, throwing down some tricks we had made up and hoping people would like them. Occasionally my roommate’s cat made an appearance. We put the tricks to music, usually over-the-top gangster rap for the irony (because we’re a bunch of kids playing with YoYos, the least gangster thing of all time) and started pushing them out on my YouTube channel for our other YoYo friends to enjoy. And they did. And we started getting feedback from other people we had never heard of, saying how much they loved the videos. And then they got picked up by several different YoYo-related blogs, and all of a sudden we were being asked for more every single day. What had started out as a simple way to have fun with our friends had turned into the biggest thing we had ever collectively done.
Long story short (ish), I moved out of that house, and Basement Sessions had to end. I think we made five episodes total in the span of about three months. But we didn’t stop making videos. In fact, the year after I moved out of that house and moved into the place I would live for the remainder of college, nicknamed the Tree Haus, I think I made more YoYo content than in the rest of my time playing combined. Every day that I had a few spare hours, I was thinking “where can I shoot, what tricks do I have finished, who can help me set up the shots, etc. etc. etc.” I was up every night fine-tuning all of my tricks for the camera, studying how other people presented their tricks and how they edited and where they were shooting for the best lighting and scenery. It was a whirlwind of learning and doing, traveling to contests, making new friends and setting up what would be the most important relationships of my life, unknowingly.
It was during this time that I fell in love with photography too. It started out with me trying to take cool pictures of my friends playing with YoYos, then evolved slowly over time. I had my camera with me all the time anyway, in case I had a trick I wanted to bust out at any free moment I had, so I began to take photos of things that interested me when I couldn’t be shooting video. It wasn’t until a year or so later that I began to focus more on photo than video, but YoYoing was a huge influence, maybe even the biggest in me even getting started with photography. If I hadn’t picked up this little toy, I never would have cared about photos, and definitely wouldn’t be doing what I am today. Traveling to contests and meeting new people and having stupid experiences with my friends was making me fall in love with capturing those moments with my camera and I didn’t even realize it was happening.
Somewhere along the way I started getting noticed. I wasn’t putting up insane contest results, but online I was becoming a pretty well-known name within the scene. I had made friends with a bunch of the big names in the community, and the videos I was making were getting picked up and shared across the internet by other YoYoers and companies. I started to get offers from companies to join their teams, to try their YoYos, to use their stuff in my videos. But I had already fallen in love with one company in particular and didn’t want to take any offers prematurely on the off chance that I might get to work with them someday.
PNWR 2013 was the first time that I really decided that I wanted to be on the CLYW team. I had been YoYoing just over two years, and vividly remember seeing their team standing in the corner of the contest venue, laughing and hanging out while everyone else kind of hung back and watched them from a distance. They had the coolest style, the best designs to their products and sponsored some of the best players on the planet, including my favorite YoYoer and the dude who inspired me the most to make up tricks - Jensen Kimmitt. It was that moment that I turned to Clint and JT and told them:
“One year from now, I’m gonna be in that circle.”
And they laughed.
In all honesty it was a long shot. CLYW was quickly becoming the biggest company in the scene, they had every player vying for a spot on their team, and they were making the best stuff at the time. They were the cool kids, and I was still a small fish in the worldwide pool of YoYo kids.
So I went harder than I ever had at anything, with CLYW in my sights. Over the next year I pumped out content; instagram clips, YouTube videos, tutorials, photos, anything I could make to get noticed. I slapped their logo on everything I did and spammed the crap out of all of my social channels, constantly engaging with people from the community who were supporting what I was doing and trying to make friends with everyone I could. I started to get offers from other companies to join their teams and I turned them down every time. I was grateful for their offers, and genuinely flattered - but it just wasn’t what I wanted then. I had my sights set on the big picture, and that picture was CLYW. I didn’t want to settle for anything less, no matter how frustrating and grueling the process was. At times I wanted to quit altogether, to just play YoYo casually and go back to having a real social life, partying with my friends in college and being normal for a change. But it wasn’t something that I could let go of that easily. I had never had a goal like this before, and even when it was incredibly difficult to keep going, I pushed through the sleepless nights and the endless hours of video editing and refining tricks until I had perfected every project I was working on and replied to every single person who reached out to me every day.
And then, on the eve of my 21st birthday, as I was getting ready to go out with friends and have a good time, right when I was seriously considering giving up the idea of CLYW altogether, I got this message:
And here’s my best reenactment of how I probably looked reading it:
To say I was stunned is an understatement. Even though I had worked toward this for so long, I had never actually imagined what the moment I was asked to be on the team would be like. I probably never really expected to be asked at all, and not imagining it was the way that I subconsciously coped with that idea. But here it was, sitting right in front of me on my phone screen, from the man who created the thing that I wanted to be a part of so much himself. I can’t really put into words exactly what that moment felt like… but here’s a pretty decent idea of what was going on in my head:
YEAASHASDFLJAHDFASDFALSDJHFAFAFADSKJFHADLFKHA 💥🤘🏼🔥🙌🏻⚡️🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉
So I typed back a message that basically said OMG YES THANK YOU SO MUCH I LOVE YOU and called my mom.
And two weeks later at PNWR 2014, a year after I had told Clint and JT that I would be standing with the CLYW team that year, and a year after they had laughed with me about it, there I was. Standing with them. A part of their crew. They formally asked me to join the team that weekend, and within a month I was official. I had done it. And it felt amazing.
For some reason this year all of these memories came back really strong. I think it’s because it’s my first year out of school, I haven’t been YoYoing as much in the public sphere, and I’m back in the mindset of grinding until I make it. I’m working at something completely different, and at times I feel really overwhelmed and nearly convince myself to quit. But I always think back to that moment three years ago, and how good it felt to be standing there, reading a message on my phone and knowing that I had made it, that my work had all paid off. It’s an addicting feeling - something I feel like I’ve been chasing again for a while, something that’s fleeting and leaves you wanting more just as quickly as it comes. But this time I know that if I put my mind to it, there is absolutely nothing that can stop me from doing it. If I can get on the CLYW team, I can do anything. So that’s what I’m going to do.
