It’s a frigid 9 degrees on a Saturday morning and the last thing most people are thinking about are summertime things. 

They’re not thinking about backyard barbecues. They’re not thinking about the beach. They’re not thinking about picnics and they’re surely not thinking about horseshoes. 

Most people, anyway. 

Deep inside the Pepperell Mill on this Saturday, though, there’s a lot of clanging going on. There’s shouting, too, and regular outbursts of laughter. 

Horseshoes are being pitched, no doubt about it, but to get to the action, you’ll have to make your way through a series of dark and dusty rooms and navigate tight hallways crammed with paving equipment and other hulking machinery. 

Your best bet is to just keep following the clangs and laughter and smack talk – if horseshoes is your game, my friend, than this is a bona fide treasure hunt. 

In a large and cluttered room somewhere in the guts of the mill you will find a couple dozen people gathered around the pits. A dozen others are milling around in other areas, cheering on their friends or just drinking beer and shooting the breeze. 

There’s a ceiling, there are stone and brick walls and it might seem gloomy compared to a sunny backyard, but other than that, it’s the same brand of horseshoes you know from back in the day. 

Well, sort of. 

“It’s an old mill,” says Gary Currier, “and it’s not clean. We use clay and clay creates a lot of dust. It’s a little bit dirty, right? This isn’t cornhole.” 

Nope, it’s definitely horseshoes, and the people who have gathered here every Saturday for five years now absolutely love the game. 

“This place,” says Robin Haley, of Auburn, “is awesome.” 

That’s the general idea around the vast room. When Currier and his wife opened Maine Indoor Horseshoe Courts five years ago, they found no shortage of people who were into the idea of pitching shoes in wintertime.  

“There are definitely some die-hard horseshoe players out there,” Currier says. “We usually have between 12 and 20 people here on Saturday and we do it every week. They’re just pick-up tournaments and everybody throws in 20 bucks. And normally the people who win donate the money back so that we can afford the rent for another year.” 

There are six horseshoe courts with a dozen clay pits at Maine Indoor Horseshoe Courts. Although most of the people who show up on Saturdays have become regulars, the group has no problem at all with others popping in.

“It is the regulars that keep us going week in and week out,” Currier says. “We are always looking for more people at any ability level to join us. On any given Saturday anyone can stop in and play, except for two Saturdays during our season when we have National Horseshoe Pitchers Association doubles tournaments. On those days you need to be a member of the NHPA to play in the tournament.”

The next tournament is March 21 when 28 teams will be competing. More on that in a bit.

‘NOTHING LIKE THIS’

Currier and his wife, Leslie, are definitely not in it for profit. They rent the space for $1,100 a month and have to pay another $200 to store their materials, which mainly involves clay, wood and fencing at the ends of each lane to keep horseshoes from flying all over the place. 

They rent the space from December through March. All told, they need to bring in roughly $6,000 per winter to break even. 

“My wife and I don’t mind putting in a little extra if we have to,” Currier says. “There are a few people who put in extra to make it work.” 

Even with their barely-breaking-even business model, the horseshoe pitchers still find ways to help out local charities when they can. After the tournament they held in January, for instance, the club donated all the proceeds to the Greater Androscoggin Humane Society. 

Nobody is in it to make money, that seems clear enough. They’re in it because they love to pitch horseshoes. 

On a regular Saturday, people flock to the indoor courts from various points of Maine. When they hold sanctioned tournaments, they’ll have people coming up from Connecticut, New Hampshire and Massachusetts, as well. 

There just aren’t many places to play horseshoes in New England when winter gets to doing its thing. 

“There are places in Maine that have a garage or a barn where they have one or two pits,” says Ron Thibeault, “but nothing like this. Nothing where you can hold 20 people.” 

Thibeault was one of several local people who jumped in to help when Currier decided to set up his indoor courts. Why wouldn’t they want to help? If horseshoes is your game, the long winter months can be miserable. And as it turns out, pitching horseshoes indoors isn’t much different than pitching them outside. It’s really just the ambiance that takes getting used to. 

“It’s a little different, I guess,” Thibeault tells me. “I think it’s just the atmosphere. Everything’s tighter in here. You don’t have the sky above you.” 

“You don’t see the sky or the trees or stuff in the background,” agrees Marc Ritchie, a champion of some recent tournaments.  

The ceiling is 12 feet high, which isn’t a problem for most people. 

Most people. 

“I’m good because I don’t throw a high shoe,” says Rob Card, a longtime regular. “But there are quite a few people who will hit the ceiling.” 

Beyond that, it’s more or less horseshoes as usual. Ritchie, like the others, just loves the game, inside or out. As it turns out, he kind of likes the whole atmosphere and the camaraderie that comes with it. 

Providing a tour of the pits, Ritchie insists that the reporter throw a couple horseshoes just to prove he belongs. When the reporter complies and metal hits metal, dozens of onlookers cheer loudly. 

“You hear all that?” Ritchie says. “That’s what this place is all about. That’s what makes it great.” 

I’ve got to give him that – though the games can definitely get competitive, it’s mostly a jovial atmosphere in the room. That’s kind of by design. 

“What we try to do is, when we do a Luck of the Draw tournament, we take the guys who we know are really good horseshoe pitchers and we don’t let them be on the same team,” Currier explains. “They’re picking people who are not as good as them so the teams end up being pretty even. Everybody has a chance to win this way. 

“It’s a lot of fun,” Currier says. “The people who come, they like to drink their beer and play horseshoes.” 

‘A HORSESHOE FAMILY’ 

Which is not to say that these horseshoe players don’t like to win. When I first met Haley, she was red-faced and cussing. Turns out that she and her partner had won nine straight games but then lost the 10th. Who can blame her for ranting a little? 

It’s kind of funny considering that Haley didn’t even know indoor horseshoes was a thing before Ritchie, her fiance, got her to come along on Saturdays. Now you’d have to drag her away from the courts. Like the others, Haley says its about the people as much as it is about the shoes. 

“When we go to tournaments, we all camp out together,” she says. “We turn a one-day tournament into a three-day weekend. We all hang out. Everybody knows each other. It’s a horseshoe family.” 

Which is not to say they don’t take their games seriously. When Maine Indoor Horseshoe Courts hosts sanctioned tournaments, there is more focus on individual skill. 

“When we have those, we keep track of ringers,” Currier explains. “So anybody who’s in the National Horseshoe Pitcher Association has a ringer percentage. We have people pitching there that throw anywhere between 5% ringers to 60% ringers.” 

Those percentages are pretty important to some folks. 

Rob Card, another regular, has been playing in tournaments for about six years. It’s near impossible, he said, to maintain a healthy ringer percentage when you have to take winters off completely from pitching shoes. 

Currier and his group will be hosting a Saint Paddy’s NHPA Doubles Tournament March 21. That’s when genuine horseshoe talent fills the place, and the pitchers themselves come from all over. 

“You’ll see people at this place from 80 years old to 12 years old playing horseshoes,” Currier says. In fact, there’s a 13-year-old girl from Connecticut, he says, who maintains a ringer average of 70 percent or higher. 

In addition to that, Currier and his wife will also travel to Monroe, Louisiana, later in the year for the NHPA World Horseshoe Pitching Tournament. Last year, they went to Texas for the tournament. 

That, the regular Saturday meeting and a whole bunch of trips to Connecticut for other tournaments and it’s clear these are people who take horseshoes seriously – and for a variety of reasons. 

“It’s nice to have something to look forward to,” says Leslie, “and it’s a great group of people.” 

For Currier and many of the others, there’s also the nostalgic aspect of throwing horseshoes. Most of them played the game as kids and often it was part of a bonding experience with their fathers or brothers. 

From Aroostook County originally, Currier said he’s always been active in sports, but at some point in the aging process, the hardcore stuff just isn’t feasible anymore. 

“I got old,” he said, “and this was easier than playing softball or something like that.” 

On this particular Saturday, the group in the bowels of the Pepperell Mill are mostly middle-age folks, either retired or closing in on it. Between 10 a.m. and 3 p.m., most of them will play 10 games, although somewhere around the midway point they’ll take a break to chug a few beers, socialize and gobble up whatever is on the menu – on this particular Saturday, someone has whipped up a batch of beans and franks. 

‘THE BEST HORSESHOE PLAYER EVER’ 

Horseshoes is probably bigger than you think. The NHPA isn’t the only organization committed to maintaining and overseeing the sport. Not even close, really. 

“We also have a Maine Horseshoe Pitchers Association and there is a New England Horseshoe Pitchers Association,” Currier says. “The Maine Horseshoe Pitchers Association started in 1926 and there has been a state champion for all those years with the exception of the WW II years. There are a lot of pitchers who do not choose to play in the NHPA sanctioned tournaments. They are considered ‘backyard’ pitchers and we are trying to find ways to get them more involved in the NHPA. I think the structure of the NHPA tournaments with keeping track of ringers and following rules is a turn off for some people while others like that structure.” 

There’s also the Kennebec Valley Horseshoe Pitchers Association and a scattering of other clubs, although most operate in summer only. The Maine Horseshoe Pitchers Association keeps track of statistics such as the state’s top 10 players and year-end averages. 

So if you’re big into the shoes and earnestly interested in things like ringer percentage and year-end averages, who can you emulate? Probably Alan Francis, a fellow from Defiance, Ohio, who has won the World Horseshoe Championship 24 times between 1989 and 2019. Regarded almost unanimously as “The Greatest Horseshoe Player Ever,” this is a guy who maintains a ringer average of over 90 percent, something no one else in the world has done. 

In horseshoe circles, Alan Francis is Elvis, probably because he’s been playing near every day since he was 9 years old.

Which kind of goes back to Rob Card’s observation that nobody is going to become great if he has to stop playing horseshoes altogether during the winter months. 

If you want to keep pitching shoes in Maine between December and May, your best bet is to get yourself down to the Pepperell Mill on Saturday mornings and navigate the dusty labyrinth toward the lusty sounds of horseshoes hitting pins. 

It’s an unexpected little journey, and a heck of a lot of fun once you get there.