By GAVIN MENDOZA
Senior Reporter
Two words that nobody is allowed to say in sports.
Two words that if you have them there is no explanation for why you have them, when you got them, where you got them, or how you are going to get rid of them.
Even typing them out is hard but here it is…the yips.
The yips are an epidemic in the sports world that when you get them you cannot perform a certain task you have performed your whole life.
From shooting a basketball, to kicking a soccer ball or probably the most common instance in sports, and the kind I deal with, forgetting how to throw the baseball, the yips can attack anywhere at any time.
After doing some research over years of dealing with this plague on and off, I have learned that the yips mostly come from trauma that may have happened as a younger child or adult.
When I think about my first encounter with the yips this is how it went.
I was an 11-year-old kid playing on a competitive baseball team called the Longmont Outlaws. I was the primary catcher on the team and in this specific game, I had to make a play on a dropped third strike that was in the dirt, so I had to throw the runner out at first base.
This is the first time I can remember thinking about the throw so much before it happened that I ended up looping the ball to first, and it did not get it all the way there. The kid ended up being safe at first, and I was awarded an error.
Fast forward to my freshman year of college and the first game I caught the same play happened — and the same result occurred. I looped the throw to first and the runner was safe.
I’m not playing this season because of a shoulder injury. Yet, I know I still must deal with having the yips with certain throws.
Throwing the ball back to the pitcher is something I have done my whole life, but after my freshman and sophomore year, it became something that seemed impossible at times.
During my sophomore year, I played through a torn labrum and bicep tendon in my shoulder. This is what really made it hard to throw, but in my mind, it was just the fact that I was throwing the ball and it was not going where I wanted it to.
I could not do it mentally because I could not do it physically. I had the yips and a torn shoulder.
The yips take no prisoners. They will attack anybody and everybody. Even some of the people with the strongest mindset I have seen in sports have gotten the yips.
TW Beiswanger, one of my teammates, best friends and one of the most mentally strong baseball players I know, experienced the yips last year.
That season being his senior season, TW was ready to have a great season and enjoy his last season on the baseball field with his friends.
However, during the beginning of the season TW had some trouble throwing the baseball to first base when he was playing second base, something he had never dealt with before.
Throughout the season TW, or Dub as we call him, experienced the yips worse and worse, and then in the last week of his senior season, he could not play second base, his favorite position, because he could not throw the ball to first base.
“Just throw the ball,” said everyone ever who has not dealt with the yips. If it were that easy then I would not have written this story.
The yips have caused many sob stories in sports and ended many careers over the years because players could not get over them.
The Colorado Rockies closing pitcher, Daniel Bard, was an all-star two years ago after making his return to the field the year prior.
He did not play for the five years before that because he could not even play a game of catch because of the yips.
Then, the season after his breakout, he was out on the injured reserve list because of anxiety and possibly another case of the yips.
I am not writing a sob story, however, because at the end of the day, I am not the closing pitcher for the Rockies or a catcher for the Dodgers or a shortstop for the Yankees.
For me and many others, the yips have made it difficult to do the things we love. But when you really think about it, it’s just two words.
The two words that plague the sports world even though they mean nothing.
Two words that, once they are forgotten, they will never be missed.
Two words.
The yips.
