New Haven Independent News Article 8/17/09

They were among some 30 players who gathered on Sunday morning on Springside Avenue at the base of West Rock to play in a tournament at one of New Haven’s best kept sports secrets: The New Haven Horseshoe Club.

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“It’s a simple but frustrating game,” said Bob Carl, a retired postal worker, who has been pitching for five years.

Yet Carl keeps coming back to play and practice on the 17 courts, which have organized play 7 to 9 every Tuesday night May to October.

“I do it for the punishment,” he said with evident irony.

Although the property belongs to the city, members maintain the splendid grounds, courts, with their posts and clay, along with the clubhouse on a volunteer basis.

Club President Chris Surprenant (foreground) said members recently put in a new light and a new roof. Over the last three years too they have saved the parks department the trouble of mowing the lawns as well.

The site is a little rustic refuge just up from Blake Street where, when the tournament got underway, you could hear the clang of shoe against post, or the plop of a shoe that missed its mark in the recently wetted clay, and some bird calls, and some friendly jibing, but not much. Of this game, which Surprenant said goes back to the Romans, think of the atmosphere of golf, but with a working-class panache.

For many of the players, it’s a serious avocation, with local, state, regional, and, in some cases, national rankings or aspirations on their mind. for a precis of the rules.

Amy Hansen of North Haven is the current women’s state champ. She has a ringer percentage of 52, which means out of every 100 tosses, 52 encircle the post. She came to the sport through family tradition and particularly her dad Roger, who’s an organizer of the sport’s hall of fame.

To make sure the kids got the pitch, he built a full length, 40-foot court in his basement for his children so they would not get rusty in the winter months.

In the first of the tournament’s six games, she was teamed with John Reilly and was playing against Bob Carl and his partner Dirk Deitz. As the sun slowly moved across the lawns that separated the courts, you could hear calls of “four dead” reverberate, which means that each player in a particular round scored two ringers with their tosses, negating any scoring.

“Ringer three” meant that out of four tosses, one encircled the post, scoring three points; if there are no ringers, the shoe closest to the post wins a point, but that must be within six inches; beyond that, no points are tallied.

In this tournament, the aim was to score as many points as possible with six games of 30 shoes each.

For Debbie Scully (left background, with Glenn Ellis foreground), also a state champ in years past, the pleasure of the game is still the wonder of it. “Every time I put a ringer on the pole, it’s like the first time. I’m amazed,” she said.

Akin in its hand-eye coordination demands to bowling, the sport is one of the few in which men, women, and even kids can compete in tournament play based on skill level, reflected in ringer percentage alone. For the championships, it is gender as well as age-based.

At the halfway point in the first game Sunday, Bob Carl was getting soundly beaten by Amy Hansen. “It’s hard to beat a 30-footer,” he said.

By “30-footer” he meant a woman. According to the rules of the National Horseshoe Pitching Association, women, those above 70 years of age, and children can all pitch from 30 feet away, not the normal 40.

So in Sunday’s tournament, which drew people from Wallingford and Norwich and as far away as Rhode Island, 8-year-old Andrew Sherwood teamed with his dad Rick, of Danbury.

Click for an article on the Danbury Horseshoe Club’s site about their “young gun.”

Sunday he was competing, and seriously so, against Butch Freer of Milford. Andrew, playing since he was 2, was last year’s state champ for his age group.

By the end of their first game, both Freer and the young Sherwood had four ringers each, while dad Rick had eight. “That’s a little below his percentage,” said his dad, but he was generally really happy with his son’s tosses.

A toss, explained Glenn Ellis, whose ringer percentage of 63.5 made him second in the state last year, can either be a flip or a turn. Harold Peters was flipping against him, which meant, said Ellis, that the horseshoe somersaults in the air. A flip spins or rotates in the air. Yet it’s more secure when it lands.

“Only one flipper has been a world champion,” said Ellis who works for the phone company but finds time to practice at the club at least an hour a day.

And practice definitely is required in this game that looks simple, but …

According to Dirk Dietz, who was at this point neck and neck against Amy Hansen, a ringer percentage of 40 will get you in the top 1,000 players in New England. Only ten of 1,000 players will average a ringer percentage of 50 or better over a season.

“One of my goals,” said Ellis, “is to be among the top five players in the country.”

What do they score? About 89 percent, said Ellis, who then went back to his pitching.

The New Haven Horseshoe Club has about 38 members. The clubs in Danbury and Shelton, where Hansen plays, have more than 200. For those interested in joining the New Haven club, the contact is Chris Suprenant .

At the end of the first game Amy Hansen’s team had beaten Bob Carl’s 55 to 30.

“You can’t beat those 30-footers,” Bob Carl repeated.

“You can’t beat 30-footers like Amy,” Harold Peters corrected him.

The next big event at the club will be state championships, on Sept. 27 and 28. Spectators are welcome.