If you’re got good beer pong form, you’ve got a good chance of transitioning well to axe throwing.
“That’s how I developed my throw is from beer pong in college. You want to be controlled and have a very straight throwing motion,” Dylan Teets said inside Swamp Axe on NW 8th Ave. in Gainesville.
Teets started axe throwing in 2021 after his wife, Krissy, kept asking to join an Orlando area league. The very first week, he ended up at the bottom of the leaderboard. Teets set up a target in his backyard and started grinding and researching. He rose to the top of the league the next week.
Then he won his first world championship in 2022. Now, Teets has three world championship axe-throwing titles, with his latest coming in April. He became the youngest world champion at 23, along with the first to claim two titles in the hatchet division.
“I think mainly you have to hate to lose,” Teets said. “You can love to win. Everybody loves to win, but you have to hate losing as well. And I’m just a really competitive person.”
A Tampa native, Teets attended UF for a year before transferring to UCF and finishing his degree. But he returned to Gainesville in September to continue his axe-throwing passion as co-owner of Swamp Axe.
The business took over The Hatchetbury space and added some upgrades.
The lanes have projectors that allow interactive games, from tic-tac-toe to bowling to an alien attack. You can even throw axes, hatchets and knives at a Seminole logo from a certain school in Tallahassee.
Teets said they also removed some of the lanes to open the space, allowing room for darts, cornhole, a pool table and a couple TVs. A bar area sells canned beers from First Magnitude, Swamp Head and High Dive.
The goal is to expand the eating selections along with gaming options. Teets said they want the business to be a home for all projectile sports.
Already, a disc golf group meets for a putting league. Portable disc golf baskets are set up in the lanes with lines showing the 10-, 15-, 25- and 33-foot lines. Teets said the business has another unused room that could be used for all sport simulators, from golf to soccer to archery.
Teets said Swamp Axe is trying to reach out to the community and sponsored a Gainesville Chain Hawks Disc Golf Club tournament earlier this year.
After his first championship, Teets moved to Illinois to help run a friend’s axe-throwing facility. Two years later, the Hatchetbury opportunity opened up.
Teets said the axe-throwing community is fairly small. He quickly met world champion competitors when he started in Orlando.
“They watched me throw, and they were like, ‘How long have you been throwing?’ I said a couple of months, and they really lifted up my ego, saying, ‘wow, you’re gonna make it to Worlds,’” Teets recalled.
The World Axe Throwing Championship started in 2017 and involves multiple categories: hatchet, big axe, duals and knives.
Hatchet is the biggest category, Teets said, followed by big axe. Duals involves a two-person team throwing at the same time, leading to some mid-air collisions.
For the hatchet category, the format is best two-out-of-three sets with a maximum of 64 points per set. Teets said all the competitors usually earn 54 points and up, meaning only one or two misses per set.
In a set, each competitor has 10 throws. Usually, the first five throws are at the five bullseyes. Then, competitors switch sides. Teets said they might throw a couple more bullseyes and then, depending on their lead, might aim for one of the four kill shots that are worth more.
The kill shots are located in the outer ring of the target and are slightly smaller than a bullseye. Teets said they’re harder to hit because muscle memory has competitors used to aiming for the center.
Teets said the business is reaching out for partnerships and figuring out how to get people interested in coming. Lots of future plans are possible, he said, including a kitchen, stage area and open space for trivia nights or someone wanting to host an event.
In the meantime, he’s also got his eyes on another championship, with plans to enter the duals category next year. Knives would also be an option, but he said that’s going to take more practice.
