WG Horseshoes · Championship Monday
Four games, four wins, no series past two. The best player in the league spent years finishing on top of the board with nothing to show for it. That ended this afternoon.
Part One · Championship Monday
Nobody needed a third game. Three best-of-three series were played this afternoon and all three ended 2-0, which means the whole postseason took six games and about an hour. Sherman and Ouellette played four of them and won four of them, closing out Dos Santos and Long 21-12 and 21-13 to take the 2026 title.
2026 League Champions
Sherman & Ouellette
The #1 seed and the #6, drawn together out of a hat, who turned out to be the best partnership in the bracket by a distance. They came in 22-5 together across four seasons. They leave at 26-5.
4-0 on the day · 17 ringers · 2 six-packs · never trailed a series
Semifinal One
21-16, 21-3
Game one was a fight. Game two was not: Ouellette threw a six-pack and three ringers, and the 21-3 was the most lopsided result of the day.
Semifinal Two
21-12, 21-14
The upset of the afternoon, and it was not close. Long opened with three ringers and a six-pack, and the #2 seed never got going.
The Final
21-12, 21-13
Sherman settled it early — four ringers and a six-pack in the opener. Long answered with three in game two and it still was not enough.
The Story
Sherman has been the best horseshoe player in this league for a while and had nothing on the shelf to prove it. The last three championships and the last three Father's Day Cups went to six other men. He finished #1 on the board and answered to a trivia question. He threw nine ringers across four games, put four of them plus a six-pack into the first game of the final, and walked off with the only thing he was missing.
Ouellette gets his second piece of hardware in three years to go with the 2024 Cup, and he earned this one — the 21-3 in the semifinal was his game, and he added two more ringers in each half of the final. The two of them have now played 31 games as partners and lost five.
Spare a thought for Long. He threw nine ringers, matching Sherman for the most of anyone, added a six-pack in the semifinal opener, dragged Dos Santos past the #2 seed in straight games — and finished the day with nothing. He led the league in wins and in ringers over the regular season too. Some years the iron just does not land where you need it.
Dos Santos deserves the same nod. He walked into Championship Monday having lost four of his last five league games and promptly swept McCullam and Tarby, the pairing everyone had penciled into the final. Then he ran into the one team nobody was going to beat.
And the reunion never happened. Cody and Long won this together in 2025, the hat split them into opposite halves of the bracket, and the only way they were ever going to meet again was in the final. Cody went out in the first round. Long got there and lost. Two former champions, four games between them, no trophy.
One admission, since we put it in writing beforehand: the playoff preview called the champion correctly and got the other semifinal wrong, picking McCullam and Tarby to reach the final on the back of McCullam's five-game winning streak. The reason it missed was printed right there in the same paragraph — the way this flips is Long, who has owned Tarby all year. He owned him again.
King of the Ring · 2026
The league handed out a new piece of silverware this year, for the most six-packs across the whole season rather than league play alone — and Sherman took that one too. He came into Championship Monday on eight with three men sitting on seven, threw one more in the opening game of the final, and finished clear.
1. Sherman 9 2. Ouellette 8 2. Long 8 4. Tarby 7
Part Two · The Whole League
A championship is two names. A season is twenty-four. Here is what everyone did between July 3 and August 16, in the order the final board left them.
Took the top spot in week three and never gave it back, including a fortnight where he sat out entirely and watched his lead shrink to three-tenths of a point before slamming it shut.
Sat eleventh in early July and climbed in every single week that followed — the longest uninterrupted rise anyone put together.
Owned the number one spot in week two and never got it back, then finished the year with more wins and more ringers than anybody in the league.
Slipped to seventh in July, worked all the way back to fourth, and threw more six-packs in league play than anyone while he did it.
Waited so long to play that he fell to twenty-first, then went 6-2 and launched nineteen spots to second in a single week — the biggest leap of the season by a mile.
Never ranked higher than fourth or lower than sixth in any week all year, and then went out and won the only thing that gets engraved.
Once played seventeen games in a single week and went 12-5, because the man simply would not leave the pit.
Climbed to third, crashed to eleventh, then went 10-2 in the final week to storm back — nobody's season had more weather in it.
Started 0-4 and buried in nineteenth, then went 5-1 to climb ten spots in a single week and hit the ten-game minimum right on the nose.
Drifted quietly down the board for two months, then went 8-2 in the final week to climb four spots — with a Father's Day Cup already in the bag.
Parked at eleventh for most of the summer like it was assigned seating, and played more games than all but one man to keep it.
Vaulted eleven spots into eighth in one glorious week, then gave four of them straight back — the wildest fortnight anyone had.
Threw nineteen games one week and twenty-two the next; sixty-two on the season, more than anyone alive in this league.
Squeezed eleven games into a single week in July, which remains the most Flavin thing that happened all season.
Dropped eight spots in one week without touching a shoe, then climbed six in the last one and finally cleared the games minimum.
Jumped fifteen spots into seventh place in his first real week on the board — the loudest arrival this league has seen.
Went from twenty-third to fourteenth in one week of his rookie season, which is a lot of ladder for six games.
Was sitting fifth on this board in July, a fact nobody remembers, and kept finding a ringer in almost every game of the long slide back.
Climbed seven spots in a week he went 3-9, which is this league's way of saying it noticed him showing up.
Leapt nine spots in July on the back of one clean win and spent the rest of the summer defending it.
Turned up from nowhere, went 3-0, and banked seventy-seven rating points in a week — then finished four games short of qualifying, which is the real cliffhanger of 2026.
Four games, one win, two ringers in it — a start, and starts are how everybody here began.
Held a spot on this board for eight straight weeks without ever throwing a single shoe, which takes a certain nerve.
Lost thirty rating points one week and won twenty-seven back the next, all without going anywhere near a horseshoe.
Next Year
That's 2026. A hundred and forty-five league games, seven hundred and sixty-one ringers, thirty-four six-packs in league play, and a champion who waited longer than anyone for it.
Now Sherman and Ouellette have something they have to defend, which is a very different feeling from chasing it. Long and Tarby have the best throwing in the league and no trophy between them this year. McCullam finished the regular season hotter than anybody and never got to the final. Weiss has the shots and needs the wins. Bugmann needs four games. Yesinko needs one.
The dates for next season aren't set yet. When they are, the board goes back to zero and everyone starts even — including the two men who just won it.