WVU Football center, Brandon Yates sat down with the media on Monday afternoon and answered some questions about the improvements on his snaps to the quarterback this past week against Cincinnati.
“They were better than they were the last couple of weeks. Now this week I felt a lot better with my grip and everything was going well body-wise so I felt a lot better with my snaps this week.”
Yates, a redshirt senior, had some issues gripping the ball the past couple of weeks due to a hand injury on his snapping hand. This led to a lot of high snaps for WVU that messed up play timing, causing the coaches and fans to grow frustrated with his play.
“I think mental aspects of snapping the ball kind of got on to me because now everybody’s watching it, everybody is focused on it. So now in my head I’m like ‘okay I got to focus on it.'”
To help with the mental side of the game, Yates said he turned to Dr. Sofía España Pérez, a Sports Psychologist for WVU athletics. Together the two talked through the struggles and how to climb over the mental hurdle Yates was facing, something he described as being “like the yips.”
“We kind of talked throughout this whole last week and then went into snapping and just kind of just wanting to make it as simple as possible and then went out there and just did a lot better job this week with the mental aspect of snapping the ball.”
Later Yates added, “Dr. Sophia explained it to me it’s like when you drive a car you don’t think about driving a car. But when you get into a situation where you might get an accident, now you think about driving a car. Ten and two, now I got to think ‘oh I got to turn a little bit, press the break’ and that’s when you start getting in more accidents that way.”
With only three more regular season games left in Yates’s career, it appears he seems to be fully healthy both physically and mentally. It will be uncertain which QB will be on the receiving end of Yates’s snaps as Neal Brown has yet to name a starter for the Baylor matchup.
Discover more from Blue Gold Sports
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
