Not Like Throwing A Softball

by Dennis Lantz
1/23/2006

It’s not the same as throwing a softball!
 
When I first started giving demonstrations with the atlatl and dart, I used to tell people that the motion of the atlatl was similar to throwing a ball… a baseball, softball or football… but with an arm extension of 20 or so inches so that you could throw harder.
 
“It’s definitely not anything like throwing a softball,” Christy told me after her first couple of lobs… and she should know because she has thrown a few softballs in her time.
 
So I had to learn that particular truth the hard way. Last summer after an afternoon of throwing darts I picked up a couple of stones that were just begging to be thrown. Sometimes I get the notion that I am Roger Clemens… well, Roger Clemens with a really slow fastball. A pile of leaves about 20 yards away seemed like a good target, just about the perfect height for a catcher’s glove. Well, not only did I walk the first batter, I quickly learned that the same muscles one uses to throw darts are not used to throw stones. The top shoulder muscle that I pulled was sore for a week. 
 
Even with that sore shoulder muscle I could still throw darts without pain. That proved to me that the two motions don’t use the same muscles.
 
So what is throwing darts really like?
 
I still tell people that the motion is similar to fly fishing… without the second hand pulling the line from the reel and without the praying that you won’t get snagged on a tree limb that suddenly grows behind your head so that anyone around laughs at your entanglement. (I understand that most people fly fish alone or with just one other partner so there aren’t too many people to laugh at them.)
 
Gary Fogelman compares atlatls to tennis rackets. He says that atlatls, like rackets, drive the object being hit or thrown from a point beyond the hand in a ratcheting motion that transfers way more energy than from the hand alone. I won’t disagree, but the last time I played tennis, the first George Bush was president and gasoline was hovering around $1 per gallon. I was complaining then too…
 
Comparing dart throwing to tennis sounds reasonable… and makes me wonder how the Williams sisters would do on the ISAC course. I’m sure they would develop their own atlatl clothing line that would probably be quite colorful… and revealing.
 
Some people tell me that as youngsters they threw apples off sharpened sticks… and that throwing darts is exactly like that. I wish that someone had shown me that trick when I was a kid… I threw apples the old fashioned way… which perhaps explains why it took me awhile to learn how to throw darts and why I still can’t hit a pile of leaves 20 yards away with a stone.
 
To this old farm boy, crabapples were for eating… just to trick my ‘city’ friends into doing the same and watching their faces... or for pegging cows (shhh). We had a cow named Crab Apple, but that was when I was younger. I don’t think I ever threw apples at her.
 
So is throwing darts like tennis (or badminton, which I’ve recently learned is actually as fun to watch as to play… and I like to play) or is it like fly-fishing or throwing apples off a stick?
 
I don’t really know for sure if any of these are accurate, but if they get the point across then they are reasonable comparisons for teaching others.