Once you find yourself embroiled in the billiards community in Pocatello, it can be hard to tear yourself away.

    It may not be as big as the pool scene in New York, Los Angeles or Milwaukee, but it’s there. And if you enter one of the many pool halls in Pocatello, you’ll find some of the best amateur players the country has to offer.

    And not only can they keep up with those big pool sharks in those big cities with the big populations, they can beat them.

    They proved it at the 2013 BCAPL National Championships in Las Vegas July 24-27. Pocatello local Tim Joseph, owner of Club 91, put together a team comprised of Shane Shumaker, Ross Gutterud, Bill Karn and Art St. Germaine. Using the club as their team name, the men entered the tournament with hopes to have fun, play some pool and relax. They ended the tournament in second place out of 554 teams in the men’s mixed open teams division and an $8,000 reward.

    And after a one-game loss in the quarterfinals, Club 91 took the long way to earn the title of runner-up.

    In every match, there is a potential for 25 total games to be played. Each member of one team plays each member of the other team. The first team to win 13 games moves on.

    In the quarterfinal match against the West Coast Sharks of Los Angeles, Club 91 found themselves up 12-9.

    But the Sharks rallied to tie the match at 12 and ended up winning to move on to the semifinals, sending Club 91 into the losers bracket.

    “Now we’ve got to wade our way through (three) extra matches to make our way to the finals,” Shumaker said.

    The good news was that it was the last match of the evening, and the team was able to recharge for a long day of pool.

    The bad news was that their backs were now up against the wall. It was win-or-go-home time. While they weren’t ready to go home, they didn’t feel pressure.

    “The way we looked at was, ‘hey, we’re really thankful to make it this far. Let’s just have some fun and win a couple of matches and see how far we can go,’” Shumaker said. “We took the pressure off ourselves with that approach.”

    The alleviation paid off, and Club 91 ran through the next three teams, including the same group that knocked them into the losers bracket in the semifinals, to get to the championship match.

    “At that time, we pretty much established that we’re capable of beating anybody,” Joseph said.      

    But the team was worn down. After playing fast-paced pool all day, Club 91 was mentally drained. Coming from the losers bracket, they had to win two games, while the Pocket Pool Junkies of Chicago had to win one.

    “To play at that high of a level, it’s probably 95 percent mental,” Shumaker said. “Because we added those … extra matches, we were mentally just out of gas. We started missing balls that we don’t normally miss and losing games we probably shouldn’t have lost.”

    Despite the loss, the team still felt accomplished. There was still a sense of pride. No team from Idaho had ever made it that far in the tournament. In Joseph’s 20 years of competing, he had never enjoyed as much success as he did in 2013.

    “It’s a huge tournament, and so to get that far is just something you always remember,” he said.

    And when the majority belief is that teams from bigger cities with a bigger pool of players to choose from typically fare better, the pride felt is a little higher among the team from Pocatello.

    “It’s something that was really hard to do, and it isn’t very often that you get that far in the tournament,” Joseph said. “It’s just a really exciting event, and it’s something that we all just had a terrific time doing.”