Sherif Abdelwahab
The USCA has announced Sherif Abdelwahab, Stephen Morgan, Matt Griffith and Carl Uhlman as selections for the 2015 WCF World Golf Croquet Championship to be held February 7-15, 2015 in Bay of Plenty, New Zealand. Abdelwahab, earned a ranking position in the event, while Morgan was awarded one of the wildcard positions.
Griffith and Uhlman received the final two membership slots. Bill Bromley is the first alternate for the US.
Grade: 2448
All-Time: 207-176
Grade: 2211
US Rank: #6 World #178
2014 Record: 6-4
All-Time: 6-4
Grade: 2114
US Rank: #8 World: #263
2014 Record: 7-3
All-Time: 7-3
Well, another summer break has concluded and I can report that I balanced my time between aggressive family and work travel with a lot of croquet development time here at my base location in Kansas City. With no true courts in the southern part of the city, all efforts of the Midwestern Croquet Association (MCA) and the Kansas City Croquet Club have been centered around nine wicket croquet. The KC Club was founded in 2011 and in that first year, it was pretty much just me with a few of the Kactus Creek club players stopping along occassionally for weekly play. In late 2012 (August 29), the first true recruit arrived and so we had two. In 2013, we started to generate a handful of new participants each week. This year, we took over a very lonely elementary school soccer field and we are now seeing a steady rotation of 10 players and a now have an email list of 25. There is still a long way to go, but we've progressed nicely with no dedicated facility. It's hard to tell if it will really happen, but hopefully, I can someday type out what I think is working and concepts we've moved away from.
It was a tough summer on the digital croquet media front. While I was away, the Croquet World Online forums were hacked and stayed down for several months. Luckily, all has been recovered and they are now back in action. On the other hand, the WCF website is still showing a "malicious website" warning. No es bueno.
On the plus side, I upgraded the Croquet Network newsletter from weekly to daily on weekdays. Like the move to weekly several years ago, the shift generated "concern" and some unsubscribes. But the best part is the new subscriber rate has spiked again and outpaces the "unsubs" by a vast margin. The appetite is there.