MORGANTOWN — In the end, Brandon Yates learned that his issues snapping the football for West Virginia University had as much to do with his head as it did with his hand.
Yates, the Mountaineers’ starting center, has found himself in recent games struggling with getting the ball back to the quarterback. Snaps have sailed astray. Sometimes the quarterbacks have been able to corral them before disaster strikes. Other times, they weren’t so lucky.
A hand injury was the initial culprit, but Yates said the problem went deeper as the season progressed. Yet he wasn’t about to throw up his hands and give up on fixing it, and neither were his teammates or anyone else in the WVU program. With some help from the team’s psychologist, coaches and some advice from some top-level former teammates, Yates has worked through his yips and returned to form.
“This last game, I feel like I was in a lot better space,” Yates said, “mentally and physically.”
The snapping issues started cropping up in WVU’s loss to Iowa State. Yates – a veteran starter on WVU’s offensive line, but in his first year as starting center – had banged up his snapping hand. It was nothing that would put him on the shelf, but enough to try another method of wrapping that hand.
“I had to tape it up kind of weird,” Yates said. “I tried it a couple of days before and I snapped pretty well with it. Then when I was in the game, I think I just over complicated it grip-wise. People were telling me they were getting high, so I felt I had to overcompensate.”
The hand healed, but the problems persisted. Yates said part of the issue was that others had started realizing there were snap problems, which made him more self-conscious about them, which then caused him to continue overcompensating.
“It’s like when you drive a car,” he said. “You don’t think about driving the car, but when you get into a situation where you get into an accident, now you think about driving the car.
“My hands have to be at 10 and 2,” he continued. “I have to turn a little bit more. I have to press the brake. That’s when you start getting into more accidents.”
To eliminate those accidents, Yates buckled down. He spent hours after practices getting in extra snaps. He watched film of top centers and their methods. He talked to former WVU center Zach Frazier, the man he replaced at WVU who now is the starting center for the Pittsburgh Steelers.
Most importantly, he said, he started sessions with WVU sports psychologist Sophia Espana Perez. In those discussions, they were able to break through the mental barriers that had been keeping Yates from getting back to his previous levels.
“She kind of just broke it down for me and made it simpler for me,” Yates said. “We talked about it all last and kind of just wanted to make it as simple as possible. I did a lot better job this week with the mental aspect of snapping the ball, getting past that mental block.”
Both Yates and head coach Neal Brown said Yates’ snapping against Cincinnati was much better than it had been in recent games. That accuracy played at least some part in WVU’s ability to eke out a road win over the Bearcats. Brown said it was good to see Yates taking ownership in fixing the problem and leaving no stone unturned in seeking the solution.
“I think he really worked at it,” Brown said. Like a lot of things you’ve got to be careful of making it a bigger deal than it is, right? And so I wasn’t sitting there on him a lot about his snaps. We just put him in a situation where he could work it, and he found a solution through several different avenues of getting it fixed.
“And he’s worked really hard,” Brown added. “He’s a mature guy. He’s older, and he’s played a ton of football, and so I think credit to him and for not being too proud to kind of get some help, too.”`
Yates said the support system he had around him made it easier for him to bounce back and gave him the confidence to keep working through barriers.
“I’m really grateful to be in the position I am,” he said. “It made me feel good, you know? … I just felt a lot better about it. I felt a lot happier having those guys supporting me.”
— Story by Derek Redd
