CONQUERING THE YIPS

WHEN they write the history of Chandlers Ford Snooker Club, the Roll-Up champion who started the 16-week handicapped series playing left-handed and finished it right-handed will have a chapter all of its own.

Back in 2024 at the Rileys club in Victoria, London, Lewis Boyce swept the balls across the table with his cue in sheer frustration.

He didn’t play again for 15 months.

Lewis came to see me in January this year. I’d never seen anything like it before. He could not bring his cue forward on the delivery stroke without raising his upper body until he was virtually standing upright.

After the first session, I said I couldn’t help him so he asked me to teach him how to play left-handed. We started from scratch, Cuestars Academy Bronze Level 1, etc, and he progressed well.

He plucked up courage to play in our Club Championship in April and then joined the Sunday night Roll-Up in May.

It was in May that I saw a request from Gavin York, who was on the same World Snooker coaching course as me at the English Institute of Sport Sheffield in March 2007.

Gavin, who hails from Northampton, is training to be a sports psychologist and was asking snooker players to complete a survey to help with his research into the yips, among other things.

I showed this to Lewis and he filled in the survey. They started conversing and Gavin offered to help.

After two or three video calls via Microsoft Teams from his classroom at Bitterne Park School, where Lewis is a teacher, he was able to play right-handed with no sign of the lifting problem.

Lewis said: “In the middle of the Roll-Up (series) I was swapping between shots and wasn’t even sure if I was left or right-handed.

“From about the sixth week onwards, everything worked out and that is when I became full time right again. I will still play left-handed if I can’t reach. The rest is a last resort.”

The 30-year-old now has a competitive high break of 25 and won the Roll-Up by just half a point from Harry Singh.

Lewis added: “I’m so motivated to play snooker. I’m just really enjoying it.”

Apparently, the issue was his eye pattern, ie, which ball he was looking at.

This is all amazing. But what completely staggered me was when Lewis said: “Gavin has never seen me hit a ball.”