Yip, Yip, Hooray
As a tennis player, I’ve struggled with the yips since I was fourteen. For those unfamiliar (God bless you, I envy): the yips are when your brain starts getting in the way of what your body knows. The yips make a previously subconscious effort feel awkward. It is like when someone tells you to think about walking, so you stumble. In the yips’ case, that someone telling you to “think” is your brain. And it won’t stop telling. In my case, my brain convinced my body “you can’t hit a forehand.” At the time of my affliction, I was the 38th ranked tennis player in the Mid-Atlantic for boys’ fourteens. I was ranked 15th in Virginia, and 2nd in my high school district. All that’s to say — I was playing tennis at a serious level. I was playing tennis at the sort of level where you can’t just not have a forehand. Or I suppose I found out: you can not have a forehand, but people will look at you strange. You can still win, but every win will be ugly. Every loss will be a “maybe things would be different if things hadn’t changed.” The Yips cause depression, send athletes to therapy, and end careers. I am twenty-seven now and still have not fully recovered from it. I’m hoping I will, but the reality is, I probably won’t.
There is no common cure for the yips, because the problem is in the brain. I also don’t think we really know why it begins. I can still remember clearly the first day it affected me: I was playing a match for my high school, out in Nowhere, Virginia, against a much worse team. The school’s courts were built on a hill, so that if you were on court one and gave the ball a little nudge, it would roll to court four. Tennis was clearly not that school’s priority, and I was playing against a football player who’d taken up tennis as a spring hobby. He patted the first serve of our match in like he was high-fiving the sun, and as I moved up to return it, I felt as though someone had replaced my arm with a different one. I felt as though someone had replaced my arm with the arm of someone who did not play tennis.
I swung the racket as someone who, as a matter of fact, did play tennis, had been playing for years — and the ball that left my racket just about sailed over the fence. At first, I didn’t panic, I focused on making adjustments. Lower your racket for more spin, I told myself. That’s how you don’t hit long. And sure, that’s one way you don’t hit long. Other ways have to do with contact point, wrist pronation, footwork, the angle of the racket face, racket head speed and the way a small adjustment of one affects all of the others. Every shot is an intricate symphony of movement you spend years as a tennis player making subconscious. The yips make a little of everything wrong until everything’s wrong. The next point in that match, I missed deep again. Though not because I didn’t lower my racket enough. Brush your wrist over the ball, I told myself for the next point. That must be the problem. I missed another, but into the net. Like, the bottom of the net. Now that I’d missed a forehand in the opposite way of the first two misses, I needed to adjust to the new issue. Open your racket face at contact, I tried. Missed long again.
This went on for a while, and after a few games, the other guy was ahead. Eventually, winning became the priority over playing pretty: I resorted to slicing every ball that came to my forehand. I found that I could do that, so for the rest of the match, I did. I ended up beating that kid, but did not feel like a winner. I felt like someone with a serious problem. One that would keep me from feeling like myself until it was solved.
The yips are, above all else, humiliating. The confidence of being highly competent in a craft is taken away. Years of work are flushed down the brain drain. Your colleagues and competitors will wonder what is wrong with you. Respect will be lost. Some will treat you like you have a disease they don’t want to be too close to. They won’t want to talk about it. Athletes don’t take the looming threat of the yips lightly. The yips have ruined, and shortened, careers. The level of assurance with which the top athletes execute their technique is hard to fathom for those of us whose abilities are average. But when a rally ball comes over the net, professional tennis players don’t ask themselves “can I return this?” A pro with the yips will ask that question every time.
The problem with the yips is that it is a problem that self-perpetuates. Having had the yips predisposes you to more yips. The next time I went to play, I was already overthinking. All I had thought of between the last tennis ball I’d hit and what would be the next was what is wrong with my forehand? That is the exact sort of mentality that makes you incapable of doing what you need to do to heal from the yips, which is let your body remember by not focusing your mind on remembering. My body knew how to hit a forehand, but my brain was convinced there was a problem, so there was one.
Sports require a lot of not-thinking. I mean it as the highest credit to athletes when I say — sports require a lot more not-thinking than thinking. It is like the opposite of being a writer. I like to believe that the thing that unmade me as a tennis player makes me as a writer. Because the impulse to question, contrast, relate past and present, and contemplate are great traits for those whose job it is to invent, and avoid cliché. But perhaps those are not such great traits when your job is to trust what’s familiar and execute under high-pressure. I suppose writers do struggle with their own form of yips, through writers’ block. But rarely does it come as a physical manifestation. For any technically demanding task, there’s a way for the brain to get in the way — but that interference is especially heinous when your work relies on your body. Call the affliction what you will: yips, analysis-paralysis, overthinking. Maybe there’s comfort in knowing it’s a devil to us all.
I went through multiple phases of coming out of, and back into, yips hell. Like I said, once you get it, you’ve got it. They’ll sneak back up as soon as the pressure kicks in. Aryna Sabalenka is an example of a professional player currently struggling. She had it real bad with the serve in early 2022. You can find it on YouTube — her having to resort to serving the ball underhand during a match in Adelaide, Australia (context for non-players: underhand serving is what coaches teach beginner children to do when the children want to play points but have a hard time tossing the ball up). Aryna Sabalenka was the number two player in the world at the time.
Her story almost has a happy ending: Sabalenka made significant improvements with her yips and won the Australian Open this year. But she still struggles in big moments. Memories run deep — for her, and for everyone else. If Sabalenka has a second serve on an important point, it’s hard, as a tennis fan, not to hold your breath. And it’s hard not to feel like she’s aware that you’re holding it. Like she knows that everyone knows that this is the thing she’s struggled with, been embarrassed by, and that some people feel sorry for her, and others find it entertaining, and others are rooting for her to miss, and the media will have something to say, and her opponent knows she’s thinking all this, and certainly wants her to miss, so steps in to add pressure…you get what I’m saying. In a high-pressure situation, the mind has its memory. One that can interfere, quite severely, with the body’s. The yips can be dealt with, but until you forget them, they’re loyal.
I do have one theory about why my yips started. Right before the match where I was first afflicted, I played a tournament in Richmond, Virginia, and throughout that tournament, I had my dad record videos of me playing. After the tournament, I watched the videos and was surprised by how my strokes looked. I think that in trying to rationalize the self-perception of my form with reality, something in my coordination got confused. The next time I went out to hit, I believe my brain was trying too hard to make my body replicate the movements that my body was used to making without my brain trying to convince it to do so. If that makes sense. Something about seeing a video of me playing shifted something in me. I don’t know if that’s the real cause of my yips, but it’s a theory. I wish I’d considered seeing a sports psychologist then, but I was too embarrassed to admit I had a problem. I blamed it on a back injury. And I suppose that I could seek help now, but at this point, I’m a hobbyist. Maybe one day, I’ll decide it’s worth it.
Every time I step on a tennis court, I wonder what will happen with my forehand? Some days, I play like the player I once was — long ago, before the yips and I met. Other times, I can hardly hit a forehand in the court. On those days, I look like a weekend warrior, and not at all like someone who was on track to be a college athlete. Although I suppose that these days, I am a weekend warrior. Still, for most competent players, the familiarity doesn’t leave them. But for those of us with the yips, a lack of familiarity is the name of the game.
