Tag: sports

STONES AT SOUTHERN TIER BREWERY


“In the world of Stones, every landscape is a canvas for adventure. From the soft, shell-strewn sands of beaches to forests blanketed in pine needles and twigs, to the manicured charm of mowed meadows and diverse soil terrains – diversity is our playground. We embrace the unconventional, where slopes, hills, and rugged cliffs become the backdrop for an exhilarating Stones experience.”

                                                            Stones Throwing Association Website

The game of Stones is easy to describe and hard to picture. The nearest recognizable relative is probably bocce; a small ball is set on a fixed piece of earth, and alternating competitors toss heavy baked-clay balls at the target, trying to get closest. But it’s like bocce in the same way shuffleboard is like golf.

So, Stones is more like golf? Not exactly. It has elements of golf, in that there is a fixed course, with fairways and hazards, out of bounds, and management strategies. But it’s more like putt-putt blended with bowling than the golf you know.

Kade Sivak is the COO of the Stones Throwing Association and manages the course located at the Southern Tier Brewery in Lakewood. It’s a unique recreation operation in Chautauqua County. He says about the game, “What I love most about the game is that it’s accessible, it can be played by people of all ages and still have a great time. We’ve had a tournament where we have an eight-year-old partner with an eighty-year-old and they ended up winning a few games and had a great time.”

A Stones course is five stretches (holes) that take you through mowed fairways, sand traps, and rough patches, around and through trees and stone fixtures, up and down hills. There are clear boundaries on each stretch (sometimes it’s a pool of water!). You play the five stretches, tossing four stones per round -some stretches remind you of golf par threes, some are longer and remind you of a par five. All stretches score the same, you throw your stones, score the stretch and move onto the next, unique challenge. There are sixteen basic rules of play and etiquette, but like golf (which has only a few rules), it’s the interpretations that are abundant…especially when you take balls of any sort into the wild and toss or hit them around.

There. Simple.

And, in Lakewood, it’s played in a beer garden. What could be better than that?

Kade manages the Southern Tier course called Brewers Hollow. “I manage all events like leagues and tournaments there,” Sivak says. Brewer’s Hollow is the first public stones course ever built, constructed by Sivak Stonemasonry. “They work as a course designer and builder for any new courses at other breweries or businesses that want to enjoy the game of Stones. We encourage people if they ever see a place that could fit a Stones course to check out our website and reach out to us so we can attempt to make that dream come true!” 

Brewer’s Hollow is the premier Stones venue in, well, the world. “We’ve hosted hundreds of tournaments as well as leagues every summer and fall that fill up quick, but we are always looking to expand and host more players each night,” Kade says. “We have a world championship every year, with last year’s having a cash prize of $1,000. This year we are attempting to take it to the next level and really give people the best experience at each tournament that is planned out this year.

     “STA tournaments and leagues are on the website that vary in competitiveness. As well as a team league called the National Stones League, that includes teams like the Buffalo Mafia, the Jamestown Ironmongers, Chautauqua Armada, and the Pittsburgh Chaos. This team league is peak competition as it is a different approach to the game but takes all the best players and faces them off in 8v8 competition.”

Play at Brewer’s Hollow, like most outdoor sports in the area, follows the weather. Kade continiues, “For casual play we will be opening up May 18th on Southern Tier Public Day where we will be offering each new players first game free as well as have the option to have a skilled player help them learn the game. Then we’re open Wednesday through Sunday until the end of September.

“We’re promoting this year as ‘The Year of Stones’, so if you’ve never played, this would be a good time to come try out the game. It’s easy, fun, and doesn’t take long to play a match. The Stones community is filled with great people that are always willing to help teach new players and it’ll be the best outdoor activity in the area. 

You can check out everything Stones at stonesthrowing.com.

Home of Lucy Hosts The Babe!

The little league baseball field at Celoron Park sits by the Chadakoin River that drains Chautauqua Lake on its southern end. Hit a baseball far enough into right field there and it could theoretically, eventually, spit out in the Gulf of Mexico some eleven-hundred miles downstream. The field is built for little league players, shortened base paths and pitcher’s mound. It’s also, as legend has it, where Babe Ruth once stood and hit a baseball into the Chadakoin River, some five hundred feet from home plate.

Except that isn’t exactly the place. The Babe belted the celebrated ball, but not quite where kids hit baseballs today. And he only did it in batting practice, not in an actual game.

Jump in your car, drive to the village of Celoron. Take the low roads, close to the water. From the west, you’ll trace the southern basin of Chautauqua Lake along Lakeside Drive, rounding onto Jackson Avenue. Keep your eyes and imagination open, lay all this land bare, take out the lakefront houses on Longview Road, take out Ellicott Shore Apartments. Take out the streets, take out the trees. Turn those acres into a vast island of green grass. Now put up a grandstand and a backstop, place bases ninety feet apart in a square, a mound sixty-feet, six-inches from the plate. Here you have Celoron baseball park circa 1921, when The Babe came to town.

When travel was more cumbersome than it is today, Western New York emerged as a convenient stop between Cleveland, Erie, and Buffalo. Celoron Park opened in 1895 and featured, at various times four major hotels and fifteen rooming houses, a bathhouse three stories tall with three toboggan slides, a barber shop, a hundred and fifty dressing rooms, a bowling alley, billiards rooms, shooting gallery, ice-cream parlor, an auditorium with Turkish spires five stories high that seated almost nine thousand. In the winter the floors were flooded for ice skating. A Theaterextended over the water and hosted dances, stage performances and vaudeville acts. The Phoenix Wheel, the world’s largest Ferris wheel, was ten stories tall with twelve cages, able to hold 168 thrilled passengers. The wooden Greyhound Roller Coaster hadthree loops and six-thousand lights.

George Maltby is the Celoron Park supervisor in 1921. He’s small, maybe 5’5”, wispy and fidgety, in charge of programming. He’s known locally for his bright attire, belted high-waisted jacket with wide lapels, narrow trousers, bright white suspenders, herringbone fedora, and deep red sideburns and mustache. He is the man most responsible for the headline in the Jamestown Morning Post October 18th; Babe Ruth To Play Here, and below that, Home Run King, Bob Meusel And Piercy In Exhibition Game At Celoron Tuesday. It is a big undertaking to bring an attraction of this size and importance to Celoron, but Mr. Maltby, after posting a big guarantee decided to take a chance. Celoron Park will be filled to capacity, packed with men in double-breasted vests and single-breasted jackets, boys in knickers and flat hats, women in flapper dresses, drape hats, and bobbed hair. Horses, carriages and Model T’s clog the street. The ten-story Ferris wheel towers over the exhibition, patrons with vintage folding Kodak cameras ride to the top and record the spectacle, 1920’s version of a drone fly-by. The bustle is electric, dampened only by a light rain, muffling voices and footprints. Steamboats unload more Roaring 20’s characters at a huge public dock.

The game is anti-climactic compared to the spectacle and the memories. The big man does indeed hit a ball into the lake, but it’s during batting practice. A young boy retrieves the ball, keeping it from the thousand-mile journey to salt water.

Celoron today is a moderate lake-side city, roads lightly traveled, simple commerce and functional government buildings replace the epic bounty of Celoron Park. But the lake and the Chadakoin are the same as that day in 1921, with newer water; the steadfast shores, the current flow and shape of the outlet are fixed.

And if you listen close, the waters whisper of great days past, confident in its pedigree. If it could talk it might tell a story about the days when Celoron Park ruled the world of entertainment, and that day in October almost a century ago, when the Sultan of Swat stormed its shores.