Sharpshooters

By John Burbridge
sports@charlescitypress.com
CHARLES CITY — Some dartball players play for money.

But the dollar bill tacted atop the dartball board/cabinet used in league play at St. John Evangelical Lutheran Church serves more as a symbol than a monetary prize.

It remains there in remembrance of the man who made the cabinet … or rather the playing field for others to come (inside) winter after winter.

“He’s the one who built this board,” Brian Squier said of his father and dartball enthusiast Tom Squier, who died on New Year’s Eve of 2008. “Just to make the games more fun, he would put a dollar bill at the top of the board … sometimes it would be a one; sometimes it would be a twenty … and place several red dots on the board. If your dart hit one of those dots, you won the bill.”

Tom Squier was the captain of the Charles City Lutheran dartball team until his death.

“After Tom, I kinda took over,” said Dennis Sande, whose team recently hosted Nashua Lutheran in the sixth week of play amid the seven-week regular season of the Church Dartball League

“We have eight teams from churches around the area,” Sande said as other teams include Pleasant Hill, Pleasant Valley, Clarksville Lutheran, Methodist (Plainfield), Immanuel and Baptist.

“We play each other once during the regular season, and then we have a tournament,” Sande said. “We have a regular-season champion and a tournament champion. They’re not always the same though sometimes they are.”

The league tournament is usually the last Sunday in January. Tournament hosts rotate from year to year with Nashua Lutheran due to host the upcoming tournament.

Though eight teams are a good number for a dartball league — one regionally renowned dartball league in Northwest Indiana is down to three — Sande remembers when dartball was more popular with about half the churches in Charles City fielding teams.

“And we took it a lot more seriously back then,” Sande said. “Teams would actually hold practices on non-league nights.

“Now, it’s all about having fun.”

In other words, teams don’t take it to the “stealing other teams’ signs” level if they ever had in the past.

Still, the weekly best-of-three serieses beckon a lot of “chatter” between opponents as well as teammates, something someone might especially expect during a Charles City-vs.-Nashua matchup.

Charles City Lutheran, which came into the night with a 4-1 series record, couldn’t help but make some “ringer” insinuations when Nashua Lutheran spanked them 11-2 in the first game.

“We normally don’t score this much,” one Nashua Lutheran player claimed. “It must be because the paper guy is here.”

To further suggest that the 11 runs might not have been a fluke, Nashua Lutheran rallied for 6 runs in an inning while winning big again in the second game.

“Even when the series has been decided, we still play the third game,” Sande said.

Usually, a third inconsequential game morphs into a dartball version of home-run derby where each batter goes for the home run target exclusively — swinging (or rather aiming) for the fences.

Though dartball consists of darts thrown at game-changing targets, it’s rather distinct from your 501, 301 or Cricket games/leagues played at most taverns. Unlike standard steel-tip and plastic-tip darts made up of small flights and shafts, dartball darts are twice as large and heavy, and made of wood, real feathers and unremovable steel tips.

And unlike the standard circular dartboard, the dartball board resembles a four-base baseball/softball diamond — first, second, third and home plate with their respective “single”, “double”, “triple” and “home run” targets descending in size. Other areas on the board are marked as strikes, balls, errors, double plays, sacrifices, foul balls and outs. Missing the playing field is an automatic out.

To note: there are no base-stealing targets, which makes dartball more akin to modern Major League Baseball.

Players may only throw with an underarm motion from a distance of 20 to 25 feet away. The Church Dartball League throws from 20 feet away — the aforementioned NWI league throws from 25 feet away with the board tilted to accommodate the ideal arc from that distance.

The Church Dartball League plays seven-inning games. Lineups can be up to nine but no less than five without consequences.

“If you only have four, the fifth open spot is an automatic out,” Sande said.

Brian Squier started really getting into dartball about the time his father died.

“I was also into bowling … it’s much the same motion,” he said, “but this is a lot cheaper and a lot more fun.”