Baseball players, especially pitchers, know the term well. So do golfers. They know it well enough to avoid mentioning it: “the yips.” There’s no strict definition, although Dr. Jason Freeman, the sports psychologist for UVA’s Athletics Department, has a provisional one: “the override of a well-learned or routine motor script.” You can throw a 99 mph fastball. You can sink a 20-foot putt or 20 straight free throws. Then something happens, and suddenly you can’t do those things, and you begin to fixate on the fact that you can’t, and then everything goes bad.