The three dozen or so men milling around the I-89 Exit 2 park and ride all wore variations of the workingman’s uniform: sweatshirts, flannels and grease-stained jeans. Some had clearly come straight from jobsites, and they seemed anxious to get the evening of friendly competition under way, shielding their eyes from the setting sun as they awaited the late arrivals.
Before long, they had broken into pairs, 20 in total, matching the number of horseshoe pits that dotted the nearby grass behind the Sharon Congregational Church. They removed the tarps that covered the pits and used shovels to turn the dirt into fluffy mounds so that the shoes had a soft place to land.
Then the teams separated into matchups, two versus two, and the first shoe flew into the air, an unceremonious toss that landed a few feet short of the stake. Soon a clamorous soundtrack had taken hold: a chorus of clinks, clanks and thuds reminiscent of a 19th-century mining operation.
Here, in the quiet town of Sharon, was the hottest ticket around: the local horseshoe league, back for its 50th summer.
The Sharon Horseshoe League is among a handful of the sport’s competitive recreational leagues in Vermont. It’s also one of the longest-running, formed after a group of men convinced a local landowner to allow them to install pits on his property in 1976. Half a century later, the land is now owned by the town and boasts a fully dedicated horseshoe court, and the league that calls it home is as popular as ever, with a stacked wait list that grows by the year.
That’s partly due to the longevity of its participants: Some have been pitching so long that they’re now sharing the court with their grandchildren.
“It gets passed down,” said Dustin Potter, 43, the league’s president, whose grandfather and uncle were among the founding members.
It’s also testament to the staying power of the old-fashioned pastime — and, perhaps, the importance of such outlets at a time when men are reporting record levels of loneliness.
“It’s tradition, you know, in a society and state where tradition is dying,” Potter said.
Traced back to Roman army camps, horseshoes remains one of the more accessible hobby sports. The cost of participating in a typical league runs about $40 for a summer, roughly equal to a single round of golf or hour of bowling. It’s less taxing than, say, tennis or its younger cousin, pickleball, with the main physical requirement being enough strength to toss the roughly 2.5 pound shoe from 40 feet away. (The National Horseshoe Pitching Association permits children, women and throwers over 70 to toss from 30 feet instead.)
And the game’s rules are easy to grasp. The Sharon league follows the rule book of the National Horseshoe Pitching Association, whose scoring system slightly differs from the one that many backyard players use.
A ringer, which refers to a shoe that lands in such a way that a line drawn between the two tips would create a ring around the stake, earns 3 points, unless your opponent covers yours with one of his own, in which case it’s canceled out. Shoes that fall within six inches of the stake, or lean against the post, earn 1 point. That’s it.
Still, while horseshoe throwing isn’t hard, doing it well — consistently, week to week — sure is.
The late Brian Simmons, a former Bristol resident who won the world championship three times, maintained a ringer average of about 85 percent during his illustrious professional career. “This whole game is mental,” Simmons told a reporter back in 2012. “It’s all upstairs. It’s a mind game.”
High-level amateurs score ringers closer to half of the time; the average person, far fewer.
The Sharon league is made up of 10 teams of four. Each week, teams split into pairs and face a duo from an opposing team. Players throw a combined 100 shoes across two separate games, and whichever team has the highest score at the end of each game gets a win.
The team with the best record is crowned champion at the league’s season-ending cookout in August. Its members’ names are immortalized on a glass-encased trophy board that overlooks the horseshoe court, which is located in the heart of town, less than a football field away from the interstate. Also on the board: a plaque bearing the names of two dozen former league members who have died.
The league is open to everyone and has welcomed women pitchers in the past, though the current members are all men. To accommodate different skill levels, the league operates on a handicap system that grants higher starting scores to those who throw ringers less often. Because handicaps are adjusted based on performance as the season progresses, players have incentive to perform below their skill level early on in the 20-week season — a practice known as “sandbagging.”
“There’s guys that come in and try to get every ringer they possibly can, and then there’s guys that have, let’s say, an easier way of doing it,” Potter said.
No one sandbags so egregiously that there’s a need for policing, though, Potter said. The vast majority of people are there to have fun and, with any luck, make friends along the way.
“If it was all about winning, you wouldn’t have this many people getting along, enjoying each other’s company,” Potter said.
The league’s camaraderie was obvious to an outside observer on one recent weeknight visit, which revealed a lively scene even without the spectators who commonly turn out during the warmer days of summer.
If it was all about winning, you wouldn’t have this many people getting along, enjoying each other’s company.
Dustin potter
The players, only a handful of whom appeared to be younger than the league itself, wore sweatshirts and hats celebrating the 50-year anniversary. As they waited for their turns to throw, some caught up with their competitors, asking after work, family or nagging knee injuries. Others sipped from beers stashed in coolers and leaned coolly against the fence that runs through the middle of the horseshoe court. Throughout it all: the constant chatter of lighthearted competition.
“Nice shoe! Nice shoe!”
“Perfect! How ’bout anotha?”
“Throwing them on the stake finally now, is he? He can do that every now and then.”
“Fuckers seem heavy tonight, huh?”
Even those in matchups that came down to the final few throws celebrated when their opponents made a nice shot.
Perhaps it is no surprise, then, that the league’s longest-standing member — Dave Potter, the 75-year-old uncle of the league president — is an embodiment of the just-have-fun approach.
The only original league member still at it, Dave has “gone way downhill” since the days of his youth , when he was a standout pitcher on his high school horseshoe team, he said.
He takes advantage of the closer throwing position, but even then he sometimes struggles to muster enough oomph to reach the stake, the result of a bum rotator cuff that aches the moment he gets home.
“I still like to come down all the same,” Dave said with a shrug. “It’s just fun to be here.”
He collected his shoes from the pit, then took a few steps forward and squinted at the stake in the distance. In one swift motion, he reached back, stepped forward and tossed the shoe, which tumbled through a golden-hour sky and landed with a satisfying thud.
The two men opposite him began brushing away the clay like archaeologists in search of forged steel. Moments later, Dave’s nephew and throwing partner, Dustin, held up three fingers and pointed at him with a nod.
It was a ringer, his first of the evening.
“Three for me?” the elder Potter asked, grinning. “Wow.”
As the evening wore on and the tarps returned to their resting places above the clay pits, some of the men climbed into their trucks to head home. But most stuck around until the final throw, soaking in a few more minutes of spring daylight.
At the conclusion of his second game, Potter ambled over to his nephew, who was tallying up the final score on a large sheet of paper. The duo had split games with their opponents, he was told, which meant both teams would go home with a tally in the win column.
Just the way Potter likes it. ➆
The original print version of this article was headlined “Low Stakes | A Vermont men’s horseshoe league marks 50 years of ringers, zingers and camaraderie”
This article appears in May 27 • 2026.
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