10 things you don't know about Seattle yo-yo champ Sterling Quinn

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10 things you don't know about Seattle yo-yo champ Sterling Quinn

Passion swings, spins, and even bounces up and down sometimes for Sterling Quinn. Kind of like the toy that's made the 14-year-old Rainier Beach teen a local legend -- the yo-yo.

Sterling used to practice four hours a day, no exceptions. Now the Washington state yo-yo champ is down to one hour a day and spends a good chunk of his time zipping around Rainier Beach on his Razr scooter.

It's not that he's bored, the home-schooled teen said on the phone last week, his voice still hoarse from having rooted for his buddies -- loudly -- at the National Yo-Yo Contest in Chico, Calif. this month. I mean, he does have a lot more schoolwork. Besides, maybe he's just that good.

Sterling got third place in the National Yo-Yo Contest's 4A Division, and you know what? He wasn't nervous. And that's the division where the yo-yo isn't even attached to the string. The Seattle Times wrote a pretty cool profile of him a couple years back. But here are 10 things you might not know about Sterling Quinn:

1) This is his most popular yo-yo clip -- and his favorite.

2) He's actually got a whole YouTube channel of his own homemade yo-yo videos.

Is it weird to watch himself yo-yo? "I guess. A little bit," he said. "It's weird to watch yourself yo-yo if other people complimented you on it. You do it every day. It's really not that special."

3) Other than yo-yo and scootering, Sterling likes to skateboard. Oh, and he's a big fan of the card games on Setgame.com. He plays every day. (Check it out.)

But his favorite Web site is Yoyoing.com. "It's a yo-yo forum that just everyone looks at," he said. "It has a lot of different things, but the forum is the feature I use."

4) Sure, not a lot of people yo-yo. But Sterling doesn't feel all that different just because he does. Most of his friends yo-yo.

"But I only have one friend that yo-yos who lives around here," he said. "He enters competitions." Is he ever jealous? "Not really." Bummer.

5) He can drive next year, but he's happy with his Razr and skateboard, thankyouverymuch.

"It's boring, just sitting in the car," he said. Spoken like a true Seattleite.

6) Sterling was a guest star on this episode of the online Seattle parody news show Seattle Untimely:

7) He's not a sports fan.

"It's so organized. People sit in school all day and wanna go play an organized sport? It just seems like I'd wanna do what I wanna do, not what someone tells me," he said.

8) He doesn't watch TV and doesn't like movies. As for books, his favorite is Eragon.

9) He runs Strung Out in the Northwest, a yo-yo hobby group that meets monthly in Greenwood.

10) And, finally, the ever calm and cool Sterling wowed the crowds this year at Bumbershoot: