A childhood hobby turned into a big part of Seals’ life. He doesn’t just collect Yo-Yos, he performs tricks with them that would boggle the mind of anyone trying to master the simplest moves: “rock the cradle” or “walk the dog,” for example.
Seals, a 2022 Cedarville University graduate who grew up in Elgin, Ill., and now lives in Oakwood, has practiced with Yo-Yos for 15 years and competed at the national level for much of that time.
On June 29, at the National Yo-Yo Contest, an event held since 1993, Seals reached a peak he had sought for years. He became the national Yo-Yo champion, winning the 1A division at the Westgate Las Vegas Resort and Casino in Las Vegas, Nev.
Seals finished last at his first national competition in 2011. He was a finalist for the first time in 2015 and had finished in the top three multiple times in recent years. He was third in 2023 and second in 2024. He thought 2025 would be the year he finished first.
“I was very confident going into it that I would win,” Seals said. “The months leading up to the contest, I do whatever it takes to win, and then the weekend of the contest when I’m actually there, I try not to think about winning because the result is ultimately out of your control. At that point, you just have to show up and do your best. It’s like going to work. That’s kind of the mindset I took when I got there. I was like, ‘Worrying about winning is not going to help me. It’s only going to make me more stressed out, so I’m just going to relax and get the job done.’”
Seals took an extra step to prepare for his final performance. He shaved his head. His new look was inspired by the song he chose to play as he did his routine: “Spiders” by the heavy metal band “System of a Down.”
“For this performance, I wanted to fully embody the dark, edgy theme of the song,” Seals said.
A friend who’s a fashion model in New York City helped Seals pick his outfit — a black shirt and grey pants — and encouraged him to shave his head. He did so an hour before the performance.
“He said, ‘You have a good face shape for it,’” Seals said. “I really thought about it, and within the Yo-Yo community, people know me. I’ve been in the game for a long time. I realized it would be really shocking and add a wow factor if it was a complete 180 from just regular average Joe because that’s kind of what I am. I’m not a particularly notable person aside from Yo-Yo.”
The look worked, as the comments on the YouTube video of the performance show.
“The spider on the belt, the album cover logo on his shirt, the bald character from the video clip,” one person wrote. “The deeper you look, the more you appreciate the beautiful details. Connor’s ability to break character and impersonate another person that we know just shows us how much passion and determination he has for this freestyle.”
Seals worked for months on the performance. It’s hard to find songs with the right tempo, he said. Once he picked the song, he edited it down to three minutes and then picked what tricks would be appropriate for different parts of the song. About 40% of the tricks in a performance are common tricks that everyone in Yo-Yo knows, Seals said, and the rest are original tricks created by the performer.
“I had my first rough draft finished in March,” Seals said, “and I’ve gone through many revisions of the performance since then, but I’ve been practicing that performance probably every morning, right when I wake up, for about 45 minutes to an hour every day for the past five or six months.”
Seals competed against 50 other competitors in the three-day competition. He had the fifth-best score in the preliminary round and the ninth-best score in the semifinals. In the final round, he scored a 94.3 out of 100. No one else topped 90.
Seals heard people in the crowd talking about his new look as he prepared to perform in the final.
“They were just like, ‘What’s going on? Is he wearing a bald cap?’” Seals said. “‘We know this guy. He’s a goody two shoes, Christian guy. Why is he dressed like this?’ I was trying to get people to be on the edge of their seat before it started. It ended up working out.”
Seals thought, “If I go through all these theatrics and then I mess up and not win, that’d be a little embarrassing.”
Seals beat the second-place finisher, Chandler Steele, by about nine points. Steele, coincidentally, is from Xenia. Seals and Steele practice together often, sometimes in Oakwood and sometimes in Xenia.
“We started about the same time in 2010,” Seals said, “and it was a rivalry that was probably a little bit unfriendly at times. We were trying to beat each other all the time. Then a couple years ago, we became very good friends when we realized we lived really close by, and we’ve been practicing together almost every week the past two years, trying to build each other up and make ourselves better. Then we ended up getting the top two in the country. That’s the power of teamwork.”
Seals and Steele will next compete at the World Yo-Yo Contest in Prague, Czech Republic, from Aug. 7-10.
For Seals, the road to the world championships started with that first Yo-Yo. He liked random hobbies as a kid and remembers getting into Rubik’s Cubes. A friend in elementary school had better Yo-Yos and more skills, so Seals started using Google and YouTube to study Yo-Yo tricks.
“That’s when the floodgates opened,” Seals said. “That’s when I saw the world of modern Yo-Yo because modern Yo-Yo is very different than what most people think. When I saw the modern tricks, and I actually got to see like the current world champion at the time on YouTube, I was like, ‘Oh my goodness, this is so cool. I would love to do this.’ Ever since then, I’ve been practicing pretty much every day.”
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