Post Stargazing Night 2026

I was doing the mental math on my outbound flight. This was my 11th World Yo-Yo Contest - which is pretty crazy when I put it into perspective. Equally crazy to realize I’ve been playing yo-yo for 15 years.

This toy, hobby, whatever you’d like to call it, has become such a core part of who I am. A community, friends I’ve known for over a decade, a lot more. In many ways yo-yo has become an extension of myself.

These last few years especially - since starting Canopy with Reuben, Coleman, Mark, and Steve, since navigating early adulthood (still figuring that one out) - I’ve had to really re-contextualize what yo-yo means to me.

Practice and competition held so much importance growing up. It was a cycle: make new tricks, put a routine together, compete, repeat. You needed to keep up, or better, outpace, to stay “relevant.” And competing can be especially volatile. Ups, downs (pun intended). One day you’re the champ, and the next you’re not making it past prelims.

These last few years I’ve been asking myself - where do I fit in? Where’s my energy best spent? What do I want yo-yo to mean for me?

Less in the individual experience of competing, it turns out. Perhaps I feel like I have little to prove. Or maybe, and this is probably closer to it, I’ve just been gravitating towards the aspects of yo-yo I enjoy the most. Community. Using yo-yo as a form of expression. Using yo-yo as a means of sharing a unique perspective.

Standing out

I’ve written and reflected on this before, but when I first started yo-yoing there was such a large emphasis on having your own style - creating your own tricks, choosing your own music. You’d be called out if you copied someone. There was this unspoken rule. A certain level of integrity. It meant you needed to lean into your personality, your unique perspective.

To fit in, you really needed to stand out.

I keep writing that sentence because it keeps being true. The thesis behind Stargazing Night hasn’t changed since our first year.

The celebration of just showing up as “you” is what drew me to yo-yo in the first place. In many ways I used yo-yo to help figure out the rest. How do I want to show up? How do I want to share? How do I want to take up space? Heck - what does it mean to be me?

Lessons I feel like I’m constantly reminded of through yo-yo. And lessons I’m realizing have mattered just as much (if not more) outside of it.

A constant reminder to show up as me. And that there are rooms where I’ll be welcomed (and now rooms I’m grateful to help build)

Behind the stage

For over a decade, that room meant a stage, a spotlight, and three minutes to prove something. Somewhere along the way I moved from the front of the room to being the one in the background - making sure the space holds so somebody else gets their time under the stars :)

I don’t think I’ve noticed the transition while it was happening.

Osaka

Stargazing Night this year, yet again, blew any expectations I had out of the water.

We held it in Osaka at Club Joule, the day after Worlds wrapped in Himeji - co-organized with AXEL YO-YO CUP, Yackle, and Ayumu. A risk in itself, as we wondered if people would even come. Would anyone travel another hour, another day, just for us? Did people find the event interesting or valuable enough to show up? Had we established ourselves enough in yo-yo?

A lot of things were different. A club instead of a ballroom, DJ sets throughout the night. Special guests - OKAMOTOREIJI, legendary DJ and drummer, and the Yagi Yo-Yo Team. Still Genius came back as our official apparel partner for the second year, with a graphic In Hyeok Choi designed just for the night: the crescent moon reinterpreted as a yo-yo, sixteen stars for the sixteen players. A wish made beneath the night sky.

We had multiple releases. Lots of moving parts. Lots to execute. All in a foreign country, too (organizing this remotely never gets easier).

Two floors of players. Voting cards everywhere. The venue, Club Joule made the whole thing feel like an underground battle - which is exactly what we’d been envisioning since Cleveland (where we wanted an outside venue, couldn’t afford it, and ran it in a hotel ballroom instead). I think this was the best executed Stargazing Night of the three we’ve done (so far).

I opened the night with a DJ set. This was new. Something I’ve only picked up over the last year (and still very much learning). I keep thinking about that - years spent walking on stage holding a yo-yo, and this year I was behind the decks instead. Beyond organizing, my job was just the music. Getting the room ready for everybody else.

Taking it in

At some point during the battles, I sat down. I didn’t run around. I didn’t go check on anything. I found a spot, and I watched, and I let it happen without me.

We wrote last year that the best moments were never planned - that the hard part was setting the stage and the easy part was witnessing. We published that sentence and then I spent a year not quite (fully) doing it. This year I did (at least I tried my best). I sat in a club in Osaka and watched friends I’ve known for a decade take a floor we built, and didn’t immediately try to tick off the next item on my to-do list.

Ripples

The crowd. The players. All the hard work. It reminded me why we do all of this, and why we might just have a voice. Creativity. Originality. Musicality. Giving players a space to show up and express themselves, as themselves. But the thing I didn’t expect more than a decade of yo-yo to teach me is smaller than that. The smiles weren’t mine. The best trick of the night wasn’t mine. The moment the room lost it over a combo - not mine either.

I used to measure this by what I could do, now I measure it by what happened in a room because we help make the room. Small stuff, mostly. Someone’s face when the crowd went up. Someone deciding halfway through the night that they’d want to battle next year.

If you take away anything from this editorial, I think we need more of this. More spaces inside yo-yo, and more spaces outside of yo-yo (especially) as well, where people can share parts of themselves fully, truly.

You don’t need us to make one (that’s kind of the point). But if you want help, please reach out any time.

Hope to catch you again soon under the stars