THETFORD — After a long day of slow-pitch softball at Thetford Academy, Joe Deffner presented the ceremonial championship bat to his longtime friend, Charlie Buttrey, although not without a painful admission.
“This hurts,” Deffner said.
Deffner and Buttrey were the co-coordinators of the second annual Thetford charity softball tournament on Saturday, with team entry fees and donations going to the Thetford Food Shelf. The two have both coached at TA for several years — Deffner in cross country, Buttrey in indoor track — and they traded playful insults as their teams faced off in the first round.
Several of the teams represented a different village within the town of Thetford, which became a point of contention between the co-coordinators. Buttrey’s team, officially named Almost Thetford Hill, comprised primarily players from East Thetford, but a friend of Buttrey’s from Concord was also on the roster, leading Deffner to refer to them as the “East Thetford Poachers.”
Deffner’s Rices Mills team raced out to a large lead against Almost Thetford Hill, but Buttrey’s squad stormed back to win it in the final inning, then went on to win the tournament.
“Thetford was basically different villages built primarily around mills or rivers, so the goal was each village would put together its own team,” Buttrey said. “It was a lot of networking and talking to people we thought might be interested in it. There were several people on my team this year who I’d never met before, who just emailed me and said, ‘I’d like to be part of your team.’ ”
Deffner said the idea for the tournament came to him after watching the upper and lower villages of Strafford play their annual softball game on the Fourth of July. The COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated food insecurity in the Upper Valley, and Buttrey had started a program where anyone could come get free meals twice a week at Thetford Elementary School. Demand for the meals was high, and both coaches recognized the need to support the local food pantry.
The first tournament was held last summer, and despite a persistent rain, Deffner said the event brought in around $1,000 for the food shelf. This year’s edition, played under a near-cloudless sky, raised $1,581 in donations, plus $300 more from the $50 entry fee paid by each of the six teams.
A substantial portion of those donations came from Buttrey himself, who pledged $10 for each run his team scored against Deffner’s. Almost Thetford Hill won that game, 18-17, so that meant $180 was going from Buttrey’s pocket to the food shelf.
John Brown, Thetford Academy’s director of facilities and grounds, was on Deffner’s team and helped get the field ready for play, and Amy Fahey, the town’s recreation coordinator, drew up the bracket and brought in the pad to represent the strike zone.
“I’m really delighted it wasn’t pouring rain,” Deffner said. “I made the little box, I made sure we had the equipment we need and we can borrow it from the academy or the rec department. It’s not that much work to put together.”
Participants and spectators also enjoyed lunch via the food truck from Wicked Awesome BBQ in White River Junction, which started out as a smoke shack in Thetford. Wicked Awesome donated a portion of its sales from the event to the food shelf as well.
Post Mills defeated last year’s champion, Thetford United, in the opening round, then beat Crossroad Farm in the first semifinal. Crossroad Farm, which consisted entirely of the farm’s employees, was given a first-round bye because its players needed to work in the morning. Deffner’s son Owen, a farm worker at Crossroad, helped organize the team.
“It’s a cool thing to see people buying our vegetables at a different setting and in a different part of town,” he said. “We try to do a lot to help the food insecure, so it’s fun to be part of that in a different way instead of donating vegetables to willing hands. We were really psyched to do that for a more local food organization.”
In the other semifinal, Almost Thetford Hill routed a team formed by Thomas Trezise, a French professor at Princeton University whose wife, Susan Brison, teaches philosophy at Dartmouth College. Trezise did not submit a name for his team, so Deffner listed them on the bracket as Tom’s Nameless Wonders.
“It’s very effective at introducing people to each other,” Trezise said. “At least for me, that matters more than the softball. The other teams are better organized, a little bit more competitive, but it doesn’t matter.”
Almost Thetford Hill then handily defeated Post Mills in the championship game. Buttrey’s team featured players of all ages, including McKayla Stanley, a rising sophomore pitcher for the Thetford Academy softball team, and her older brother Nathan, a baseball player at TA.
Trash talk abounded both during the tournament and beforehand on the Thetford town Listserv, where Buttrey said his team was motivated to beat Deffner “with the passion of a thousand burning suns.” When Deffner drew a walk against Buttrey’s team, Buttrey said he was making the “walk of shame” to first base after refusing to swing the bat.
“We recognized that the food shelf could use a little boost,” Buttrey said. “And it was also an opportunity as a community to get together and have fun. No one’s taking this too seriously, but we’re having fun, and the main thing is we’re raising some more money for the food shelf.”
Benjamin Rosenberg can be reached at brosenberg@vnews.com or 603-727-3302.