This is my hero, and she plays horseshoes

Apparently Spokane is the horseshoes hotbed of Washington State, and we have the Lebron James of horseshoes sitting in our backyard.

On a sizzling summer evening, Kaiti Reeves demonstrated the form that made her a champion. She wrinkled her sunburned nose, drew her arm back, leaned to the right, and sent a horseshoe sailing through the air. With a clink, it hit the stake.

“That’s a ringer,” she said.

The 16-year-old Shadle Park High School student is the Washington state Girls Junior horseshoe champion. Quite an accomplishment since she’s only played for a little over a year.

“I took the state championship from a girl who’d been playing since she was 10,” Reeves said.

While league pitching is new to her, the backyard version of the game is one of her childhood memories. “We always played horseshoes when we went camping,” she said.

This definitely makes me want to go out and start plating horseshoes again. I was quite the ringer when I was a little child. Is there a professional horseshoes league somewhere?