Almost every weekend, somewhere in the United States, a group of yo-yoers assembles to be judged on their skills. The most skillful of them move out of their city groups to compete in state, then regional tournaments, culminating in the annual US National Yo-Yo Contest. And for photographer Chona Kasinger, one of those regional tournaments—February’s Pacific North West Regional Yo-Yo Contest—was too promising to resist.

Kasinger, who splits her time between Seattle and New York City, seeks out subcultures like the competitive yo-yo world in order to balance her more conventional commissioned work. “I say yes a lot,” she says. “Jell-O wrestling to CEOs, I kind of shoot it all.” Part of the appeal is that events like these get far less attention than massive cultural moments like Comic-Con International; her photos are distinctive because the things they chronicle are.

The competitive yo-yoing community has steadily grown in the 26 years since the National Yo-Yo League was founded. Because the organization’s beginnings in the 1990s coincided with the internet’s explosive growth, yo-yo enthusiasts began to find each other online and teach newcomers their most impressive tricks.

Bob Malowney, who founded the National Yo-Yo League and currently directs the National Yo-Yo Museum in Chico, California, had no way of anticipating this widespread interest. "We were just interested in getting kids to try something that my generation had played with when we were kids," Malowney says. "People were more excited than we ever would’ve thought."

What began as a few contests for enthusiasts turned into a community of skilled competitors who practice five different styles of play, and small audience-less competitions in gymnasiums transformed into larger, flashier events, complete with entry fees. “Nowadays, it’s a creative art, very much like dancing or performance,” Malowney says. “They create unique maneuvers, tricks, the way it looks onstage, the way they behave and perform onstage to the music they perform to.”

Although the yo-yo community is still relatively small compared to other competitive activities, while walking around the convention center, Kasinger felt like the outsider—a feeling she’s used to by now. “Being a photographer is being a professional outsider,” she says. “Maybe I’m attracted to the stuff that’s more alienating.”

In spite of that alienation, or maybe because of it, Kasinger felt comfortable being a fly on the wall in the competition’s practice area, dodging yo-yos left and right. Relying on her flash in the crowded, poorly lit convention center, Kasinger’s photos highlight only the yo-yo and its player, mirroring the way each competitor’s nervous energy translated into a "very outward display of focus" as they prepared to compete, she says.

As her series reflects, relatively few girls participate in these yo-yo competitions—something Malowney is acutely aware of. The population also skews much younger than it used to; by the late ‘90s, the hours that younger competitors were able to devote to practicing made them elite performers, as older yo-yoers with other careers and families retired to judging, leading to even more growth in the number of local competitions.

And that’s exactly what Malowney and others wanted when they started the league: to build a community around an activity that had given their generation so much joy. He considers the contests a practice in making and collecting contemporary history, but that’s not what he considers most important. “I’m always reminding these young, twentysomething yo-yo players: ‘Don’t forget to turn back and teach the kids,’” he says.