The Sharp Shooters, a six-man Springfield team, took home the coveted first place Charlie the Cougar trophy and $11,000 prize money at the 44th annual VNEA World Pool Championships in Las Vegas earlier this month. The 2024 VNEA open division is a tournament for non-professional players, and it hosted 383 teams from 20 different countries.
“We thought maybe we’d come in the top 16, but nobody thought us old dudes would win it,” said Mark Dean, the Sharp Shooters team captain. “We had to change our plane tickets because we’d planned to come home the day before it even ended.”
The VNEA championships is a grueling, weeklong tournament where teams play daily beginning in the early morning hours. “It’s a lot of endurance, mentally exhausting, and there’s a lot going on when you’re playing at that high a level,” Dean said.
In 2023, the Sharp Shooters won the American Cue Sports Illinois State Championships but came in 97th at the VNEA competition. Since then, they’ve enlisted the help of a professional pool player instructor, Mark Wilson. “My game has really elevated since working with Mark. He was on the U.S. team; he’s very knowledgeable. It’s unbelievable what the guy knows,” said Jeff Colvin, a core member of the Sharp Shooters since 2012. Even after playing pool for many decades, the whole group believes they’ve grown and improved a lot these past few years.
Their love for the game developed early, with most of them being self-taught. They either played with their dads during adolescence or met up at a pool hall as teenagers. Colvin was hit by a car when he was a child and unable to go to school. “I had a home tutor, so pool was what I did for most of the day. I made a little short-stick and threw myself around the pool table in my wheelchair,” he said. Dean remembers playing before he was tall enough to reach the table. “I’d carry a little stool around, climb up and take a shot, climb down and move it again,” said Dean.
Dean met his first teammate, Marc Baker, at the now closed Scooby’s & Stix when Baker was in his early 20s. Over the years they’ve gathered their pool crew, finalizing the group with the addition of Joe Neilsen in 2021. The team formed when they decided they wanted to play in the Vegas tournament.
Most of the team has known each other for 25 years or more, playing with and against each other across pool halls in the central Illinois area. They all refer to the Sharp Shooters as a “band of brothers” and believe this team has the winning combination of skill and solidarity.
Baker said, “Our team camaraderie is great; we’re super close. If somebody loses a game, the next guy picks up and wins the next game. We pick each other up really well.”
Bruce Boehler, the oldest member at 71, has been with the group since 2010. “I try to keep everybody in line and keep them calm. I’m a pretty good cheerleader for them, too. We’re all great players,” said Boehler.
Now that they’ve won the open division, the Sharp Shooters are automatically placed into the intermediate division for semi-professional and professional players at the 2025 VNEA tournament. “We’d like to win intermediate back-to-back with the open, so we’re already talking about how we’re going to get better,” Dean said.
Colvin is confident. “I feel we have a good shot at intermediate. The level of play with the top 20 open teams is highly competitive. It will be the same level of competition in intermediate, and I think we could do very well,” said Colvin.
Unfortunately, the world of pool is changing. The Sharp Shooters played for many years out of Starship Billiards Parlor until it closed earlier this spring. Starship was the last remaining pool hall in Springfield, so there’s currently nowhere local for the team to play. They said they will likely need to travel to Decatur to participate in a league.
“This was a good year to win it, because we don’t know what’s going to happen now,” Baker said. “It’ll be a lot harder to make it through, but what separates us from most teams is there’s no weak link. We’re all strong shooters, and we all want to win,” he said.
Courtney Wick is a Springfield writer and assistant bureau chief for Department of Human Services. Her father was a semi-professional tournament pool player in the central Illinois area.
This article appears in GRILLIN’ and CHILLIN’ 2024.
