At school assemblies, corporate events, and weddings, Dave Schulte’s yo-yo spins, sleeps, and swings. He rocks the cradle, fires the gunslinger, and sequences the DNA.
As he explains the science behind the tricks, Blink-182’s “First Date” blares the soundtrack to his freestyle and audiences of all ages cheer. The man in the black-and-red bowling shirt dazzles.
Yo-yos are more than a hobby or job for Schulte—better known as Dazzling Dave Yo-Yo Extraordinaire. They’re an identity.
In the basement of his Brooklyn Park home, his yo-yo room is full of trophies, photos, and memorabilia. Inside the ornate display case that he built, two towers of yo-yos rotate the original Dazzling Dave models, some pieces of yo-yo history, and others he just likes. There’s a blue yo-yo and a pink one, which he etched with the names of his son and daughter, respectively, as birth announcements.
Over three decades, Schulte has built a decorated career as a professional yo-yo player. He has traveled across the world to perform and teach tricks.
“It's a great job,” he says. “It's so much fun. I enjoy every minute of it.”
The born-and-raised Minnesotan is part of a rich history of yo-yoing that continues today with the MN State Yo-Yo Club.
“When you think ‘Minnesota yo-yo,’ you think Dave,” says club co-organizer Buddy Moreno, voice full of admiration.
The Making of a Yo-Yologist
Yo-yo pros go by many names: yo-yoists, yo-yologists, or Schulte’s preferred term, yo-yo players. Whatever you call it, Schulte’s path to this vocation started in 1993 during finals week at the University of Wisconsin-Stout.
“That very first yo-yo was my neighbor’s in the dorm. I'm all stressed out. He's like, ‘Hey, play with a yo-yo. That’ll relieve stress,’” he remembers. “And I played with it for maybe a half an hour.”
Thanks in part to the yo-yo, Schulte received such good grades that he convinced his mom to buy him a $75 Silver Bullet as a reward.
“That's one of the main reasons I'm good at yo-yos to this day,” he says. “Because every time I opened the drawer—all yo-yos end up in a drawer eventually—I’d go, ‘Oh my gosh, my mom's gonna kill me if I don't learn a new trick.’”
Schulte tamed increasingly difficult tricks by reading yo-yo newsletters, watching VHS tapes, and driving to Eau Claire for in-person instruction from World Yo-Yo Champion Mark Hayward. By 1994, he’d become so proficient that he entertained guests at his own wedding reception after tying the knot with his wife, Kim.
In 1995, Schulte’s brother-in-law invited him to perform for his students in Indiana. Thinking it would just be one class, Schulte arrived to find two full gymnasium assemblies of 350 kids each. A handscrawled poster on the wall read: “Central Elementary’s first (and probably last) yo-yo day, featuring Mr. Kochendofer’s brother-in-law and his $75 yo-yo: Dave Schulte.”
Pondering this on the return trip to Minnesota, Schulte realized he was going to need a stage name. “How about Dazzling Dave?’” Kim suggested before they’d even crossed into Illinois. Schulte, knowing they had hours of highway ahead, replied, “Eh, we can come up with something better.”
Yet by the time the couple was on the road to the 1996 World Yo-Yo Contest in Rapid City, South Dakota, the moniker was permanent—with one small addition. Dazzling Dave Yo-Yo Extraordinaire had been performing and competing more outside of his day job, teaching shop class in Bloomington and Edina.
“It was just a little hobby then,” he says. “But my wife wanted to go to Mount Rushmore and the Badlands and go camping—and for part of a day, we can go to that yo-yo contest.”
Schulte swept the contest with a perfect score, a victory that sent his life down a different path.
“I left teaching in 1998 because a company called and asked if I wanted to travel around the world and be a yo-yo man,” Schulte says. “I started traveling with Team High Performance and basically never stopped.”
A Brief History of Three Yo-yo Booms
Wood, metal, and clay yo-yos have existed since antiquity.
“While many believe it likely first appeared in ancient China, the earliest recorded reference comes from Greece around 500 B.C.,” explains Valerie Oliver, a 2021 National Yo-Yo Hall of Fame Inductee who grew up in Minneapolis, for the Museum of Yo-Yo History.
During the French Revolution, the “joujou” provided an escape for Napoleon’s soldiers anticipating battle and nobles awaiting the guillotine. In 1866, an “improved bandalore” design was patented in the U.S.
However, it wasn't until the 1920s that a Filipino emigre, Pedro Flores, kicked off the first yo-yo boom in California. Artisans in his homeland had handcarved the toy for centuries. In fact, “yo-yo” derives from a Filipino term meaning “come-come” or “to return.” He added a string that looped around the axle so the yo-yo could spin continuously—aka “sleep.”
To sell these yo-yos, Flores and several employees demonstrated tricks and taught kids in public settings. In 1929, he sold the company to businessman Donald Duncan, who turned it into a craze nationwide.
Each subsequent boom in yo-yo sales has relied on in-person selling. The best yo-yo salesperson in the world, according to Oliver, is a kid who knows how to use one.
Oliver would know. She began yo-yoing in 1962 at six years old during the second yo-yo boom. “My older brother, Forest, was getting involved in yo-yos and spin tops, and I wanted to do whatever he did,” she says.
The siblings frequented the local Duncan rep’s demonstrations at toy stores across Minneapolis, and Oliver won the Minnesota State Championship in 1972. While it was an important moment for her, it happened as the yo-yo craze imploded, again, as Duncan went bankrupt.
In the early 1990s, Oliver heard rumblings about a renaissance. She picked up her yo-yo, competed in the 1995 World Yo-Yo Contest in Las Vegas, and started a club, the Twin Cities Spinners. There, she met Schulte and other promising yo-yo players such as John Datoy (Narum) who in 2005 became the youngest Yo-Yo World Champion at age 11.
Oliver and her husband, Yo-Yo Grand Master Dale Oliver, popularized their Science of Spin course, which explained scientific concepts through yo-yo tricks and made yo-yo assemblies in schools more common. They also co-founded the Spintastics yo-yo brand.
Air Traffic, the Twin Cities hobby chain, began stocking yo-yos in the mid-1990s after primarily selling kites, according to store manager Ryan Groth. “Yo-yos were the next logical step to expand our skill toy section,” he says.
Then, 1998 saw higher yo-yo sales than any year prior or since, according to Oliver.
“This was due to the massive, worldwide promotion by Alan Nagao of High Performance Kites (HPK) out of Hawaii,” she says. “He not only sent adult demonstrators, Dave included, all over the world, but added a team of yo-yo performing kids.”
An alternative to the Science of Spin, HPK’s Team High Performance promoted believing in yourself and achieving great things—as a means to sell yo-yos, of course.
Based on these roughly 30-year cycles, are we approaching the next yo-yo boom? Oliver is clear: “This is wishful thinking.” Groth has seen social media expose a new generation to yo-yos, but that hasn't translated into massive sales.
“Some years are a little up or a little down, but yo-yo sales are ever-present within our company,” he says. “I would say our staff's enthusiasm for yo-yos is the main driver of sales.”
The Yo-Yo Life’s Ups and Downs
When Schulte returned from his whirlwind tour with Team High Performance, he opened his own business in 2000. He started teaching the Science of Spin course and sold Spintastics yo-yos, eventually creating a Dazzling Dave line.
While no longer a teacher, Schulte found himself at schools constantly. That’s where most kids encounter the unique phenomenon that leads them to pick up the hobby: the yo-yo assembly.
Moosa Khan, co-organizer of the MN State Yo-Yo Club, says seeing Dazzling Dave perform was his entry point. The Eden Prairie native remembers hearing about an assembly at his middle school in 2014.
“My friends were like, ‘It's this guy who sells yo-yos for $30. Who wants to buy that?’ I was like, ‘Yeah, that sounds silly,’” Khan says. “Then I went to watch a show, and I was like, ‘Whoa!’ Dave puts on a very polished performance, and he's honed it to his audience.”
Khan bought a yo-yo. Luckily, this was one of Schulte’s weeklong sessions, where he performs one day and then provides hands-on instruction in classrooms for several more.
Schulte averages 165 paid bookings each year. Some are multi-day sessions like the one Khan attended, while others are small events lasting a couple hours. For more than two decades, he stitched together a living this way.
Then came 2020. On a single day in March, roughly half of Schulte’s bookings for the year cancelled due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Social distancing and e-learning simply weren’t compatible with the hands-on teaching and sales model that Flores pioneered almost a century earlier.
Though he performed for some first responders that summer and a YMCA daycare—with everyone wearing masks and sitting in their own hula hoop on the floor—it wasn’t enough money and didn’t offer the same sense of community.
So Schulte put his shop class skills to work by handcrafting garden benches in his garage workshop, and boosting his presence on YouTube.
“I realized very, very quickly that, ‘Boy, I really want this yo-yo job to come back,’” he says.
The Return of Yo-Yo Club
After that fateful yo-yo assembly, Khan began visiting Air Traffic stores to see demos and master tricks. He also attended meetings of College for the Easily Amused, the yo-yo club Schulte formed after the Twin Cities Spinner folded. When the pandemic ended that club, too, he noticed the hole it left in the local yo-yo scene.
Not long after, Khan started hanging out with other yo-yoists at the University of Minnesota. Soon, he formed a student group with four-time state yo-yo champ Adrian Velez.
People trickled into club meetings and, as folks graduated, they moved off campus and became the MN State Yo-Yo Club. Attendance picked up when established yo-yoists, including Schulte, started coming and promoting the club. Beyond community, one-on-one knowledge sharing is the most important facet of the club, according to Moreno.
“I consider myself kind of OK,” he says. “But I got exponentially better when I was able to come here and share tricks and talk to people about how to do things.”
Khan, who’s now a PhD candidate in physics at the U, is continually thrilled by how much he learns from others. “Physics helps you understand the mechanics of it, but it's not going to make you better with your hand-eye coordination,” he says.
Club meetings typically take place every other Sunday at Vandalia Towers in St. Paul. Khan and Moreno emphasize that anyone is welcome to attend. That includes enthusiasts of other skill games, like spin tops, kendama, etc.
The club also hosts the MN State Yo-Yo Contest, which will take place on October 4 at the Underground Music Venue in Minneapolis. This is the biggest yo-yo competition in the state after the Midwest Regional Yo-Yo Championship, which Schulte hosts each spring at the Mall of America.
When I visited a club meeting to take photos, I asked Khan to teach me a trick, hoping I’d learn something I didn’t know when I was a kid. We had to start with the basics, he said, which starts with throwing the yo-yo correctly.
Tying the string around my middle finger’s middle phalanx, not tight against the knuckle.
Holding my arm at a right angle, swinging down hard and forward, with a flick of the wrist.
Seeing me struggle, Schulte guided my arm, explaining each step. Soon, I was throwing sleepers and clumsily trying out the slick ball bearing yo-yos that club members used. My joy at yo-yoing had gone away with age, but with Schulte’s help, it returned.
This preternatural ability to switch from performer to instructor is what sets Schulte apart, according to Oliver.
“The true key to promoting the sport is teaching,” she says. “And Dave is a great yo-yo teacher.”
