The Yips Continuum: The Psychology of Sports Performance Breakdowns

The yips is a phenomenon that causes athletes to suddenly experience the inability to adequately execute tasks that require finely controlled motor skills. This dissertation implemented a hermeneutic phenomenological method in order to better understand what it is like for baseball players to struggle with the yips. This study served to further corroborate previous findings pertaining to the yips, focal dystonia, choking, reinvestment of control in the execution of automated motor movements, performance anxiety, attention, focus, and the acquisition of motor skills. Overall, the yips experience as shared by the participants was discussed as one of persistent and reoccurring difficulty. The onset of the yips was generally unexpected and tended to occur toward the beginning of or preseason stages of the baseball season. The onset of yips symptoms occurred when participants felt motivated to demonstrate strong performances in front of critical audiences. None of the participants were fully able to overcome the yips, and the majority of the participants eventually shifted to a different position on the baseball team itself. Routine throws of a short distance were most prominently affected, while participants unanimously endorsed that longer throws and time sensitive throws that meant little time to prepare or "think" were least affected. The sudden and unprecedented nature of first yips experience gives credence to the physiological pole of the yips continuum, and experiences consistent with symptoms of performance anxiety, choking, reinvestment, internal focus, and subsequent ruminative and avoidant behaviors served to further validate the psychological pole of the yips continuum.