Hi there! I’m Bethany, the founder of Sjoelen UK. At the time of writing, it’s basically just me, a sjoelen-playing island in an ocean of, well, everyone else. It seems strange, now I think about it, that a game I’ve been playing nearly all my life is only played in the UK by a very small number of people, and I want to do something about it!
When I was a little girl, I went on holiday with my parents to Spain. It was the first time I’d ever been on a plane and certainly one of the first times I’d stayed in a hotel – and it was amazing. We stayed in Tossa de Mar on the Costa Brava and went to lots of exciting places.
I particularly remember seeing the Barça pre-season showcase under Terry Venables and then crying because the musical fountains were so beautiful that I didn’t want to leave (it was very late and I was probably very tired by then!)
Anyway, one of the abiding memories of the trip was seeing people playing this strange game I’d never seen before. What looked (from a distance) like a wallpaper pasting table was set up in the shade of some trees in the hotel grounds. On closer inspection, the players were sliding discs down this table into slots at the end.
My parents were as intrigued as I was and, after a few tentative tries with no idea of the rules, a kind Dutch man put us out of our misery and taught us how to play sjoelen.
We played the game the whole holiday. My parents had palled up with another couple and they played too. I was a little bit too small to be any good at this point, but I still enjoyed the game and wanted to play along with the rest of the crew.
When we got home, my parents weren’t done – they wanted to play more, but there was one problem: where would they be able to get a board in the UK? Don’t forget that this was long before you could just look it up on the internet. Searches of library catalogues for books with more information about the game didn’t yield much either.
So, eventually, having more or less given up on finding a board for sale, my Dad made one. From memory. No actual measurements to go from, no helpful pictures. Looking back now, it was a touch on the large side, but overall he did an absolutely brilliant job and we spent many happy evenings and weekends playing sjoelen. Or shula. Shooler. No-one really knew how to spell it. We didn’t care.
Any time anyone came round to the house, we played sjoelen. My schoolfriends (or a significant proportion of them, at any rate) played sjoelen.
I left home to go to university and my playing time decreased until I eventually wasn’t playing at all.
Fast forward a couple of decades and I was at the Campaign for Real Ales’ Pig’s Ear Beer Festival in December 2021. CAMRA beer festivals often have a stand with some bar games for people to have a go at and win prizes. I just happened to notice that one of the games they had was sjoelen.
I didn’t think much about it at the time – it almost caught up with me later when I thought, “Oh goodness, that was a sjoelen board, wasn’t it?” And then it played on my mind for a bit and I thought about getting one for the taproom at our family brewery.
Initially, I asked my Dad if he had the plan for the one he made – it’s still used but he would have had to measure it to get the dimensions and plan, and now that we do have the internet, I researched how much it would be to just buy one. I found them to be more reasonably priced than I thought and decided that when the materials and the time to make one were considered, it was actually cost effective to buy one – and that also meant we could have a tournament standard sjoelbak to practise on.
When the sjoelbak arrived in the taproom, it was an instant hit – I unwrapped it while the bar was open and then couldn’t get a look in because some of the regulars wanted to play!
Finally, I did manage to get disc in hand and a flood of nostalgia hit me. And I wiped the floor with everyone, even after not playing for 20 years. It turned out I was fairly good – not brilliant, but fairly good.
The sjoelbak continued to be popular and I started wondering whether there were other people playing in the UK and whether there were competitions or leagues being organised. Online research came up with a pretty emphatic no – if there are, they must be very localised and not advertised online. I did find a company offering sjoelen tournaments in the South East, but these are one-offs, not an ongoing playing of the sport.
I contacted the Algemene Nederlandse Sjoelbond (ANS, the Dutch Shuffleboard League) and asked them if they knew of any activity in the UK. They didn’t. And they also confirmed that no UK team had played in the last few World Cups (or possibly at all).
Then I found the Internet Sjoelen League, run by a chap in Vancouver, Washington (USA), and I asked him the same thing – are there UK players? He’d had a few come through the league but they’d been inactive for a while and he didn’t know of any concerted effort at organising sjoelen as a sport in the UK.
This led me to a few places. First, I joined the Internet Sjoelen League. I have to be in the rookie division for now, but on my current form, I’d be somewhere in Division E (there’s an F and a G too). Then I decided to see if I could play in the World Cup. The kind person I’d been in contact with at the ANS told me how and when to enter, and that is the current goal.
Come 26 May, I intend to be listening to my national anthem and walking out in my national sjoelen shirt as an international sjoelen player. Sounds bonkers, now I think about it.
