Soo: Block H Entertains at Kelburn #05

Two pegged-down games from Block H provided the morning's entertainment for a small group of idle tournament players and other spectators at Kelburn. Samir Patel (ENG) had won the block on 8/9. Jim Nicholls (AUS), with six wins, resumed with Sam Murray (SCO), on five wins. Stuart Lawrence (USA) and Andy Myers (ENG), each on five wins, were the other pegged-down game. With Greg Fletcher (AUS) at 6/9, a Murray win would create a four-way tie for second place and hence a two-round playoff. Lawrence won his game +25, taking advantage of a wrong hoop run by Myers. Now he and Fletcher became Nicholls's biggest fans.
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Clarke: A Wild Day of Playoff Action #05

Today was the day that the croquet really started to heat up. We had game after game of excitement and tension. Possibly the most exciting game was played at Kelburn between Jim Nicholls and Sam Murray. Time was called with Sam on rover and peg and Jim on rover alone. Sam had a tough 4 yard rush down the East boundary with his ball for rover to Jim’s ball and opted to play his peg ball, roll partner towards rover and peg out to equalise.
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Morning Coffee: The Inevitable Mar-a-Lago Trump Backlash

The inevitable Mar-a-Lago Trump croquet backlash has officially kicked off. Cue the fireworks and congratulations to the Miami Herald and Carl Hiaasen as first out of the gate. In fact, he gave croquet first mention in his brilliantly circular fake news/non-fake news posting:
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Morning Coffee: Chilton, MacRob Exhibition and More

As the new year settles in, I can certainly acknowledge that over the past few weeks Croquet Network has been all like "me, me, me," with posts on the Best of 2016, Top Supporters and our recent announcement of our 2017 Media Kit. We'll chalk that up to a little bit of annual housekeeping and specifically in the case of the media kit -- a strong desire to expand the editorial output of the website. A mission which obviously accelerates as the budget increases.

Looking forward though, we are now ready to get back to on-site tournament coverage and the usual features on the sport of croquet. With that in mind, I always enjoy the annual re-start of the Morning Coffee winter spring series. Like a lot of good cable or Netflix series, this weekly roundup of world croquet news now focuses on a short run from January into the spring. At some point, we all need to get off the keyboard and get onto a court.

Enough with the long intro, we're back in action for 2017 and here's your weekly rundown ...

2017 MALLET POLL: Get ready for Croquet Network's most popular annual series. The 2017 Mallet Poll will launch for public votes, this Friday, January 20, 2017 and run through the end of the month. And yes, once again we'll follow up in February with an updated 2017 Mallet Directory based on the results.

FORDYCE WINS NZ GC TITLE: Sixteen year-old Edmund Fordyce became the youngest player to win the New Zealand golf croquet national open singles title with a 5-7, 5-7, 7-3, 7-5, 7-1 over Josh Freeth in the final. Full story from the Nelson Mail.

BOB CHILTON PHOTOGRAPHY: CWO has a piece on Bob Chilton's incredibly engaging photography that goes well beyond croquet. You might note that the last photo in the article appeared on the cover of the USCA's Croquet News for the 2015 Volume 1 issue. All of the photos in the CWO article are downsized, but you can see Chilton's full collection on his website: www.bobchilton.com. I recommend following his Facebook page as it's always enjoyable to see one of his beautiful nightshots pop in your newsfeed.

MACROB EXHIBITION TEST RECRUITING: The current issue of the USCA's monthly PDF newsletter is calling for six championship flight association croquet players to play a one-day exhibition test match against England’s MacRobertson Shield team. Each player will play two singles games and one doubles game. The exhibition will be played Saturday, April 15, 2017, at the Pasadena Croquet Club, Pasadena, California. Anyone interested should e-mail Eric Sawyer at ecsccs323@gmail.com. He will select the six players with the highest dynamic WCF AC grades.

FEC EUROPEAN GC CHAMPIONSHIP: The UK's Croquet Association fixtures calendar has listed the 2017 European Golf Croquet Championship dates as May 24-28, 2017 to be held at two clubs in Cadiz and Seville, Spain. More infomation on the event from the CA website.

GERMAN GOLF CROQUET OPEN: The Ninth German Open Golf Croquet Tournament will be held at Renzel, close to Hamburg, Germany from Saturday 20th to Sunday 21st May 2017. .

NICHOLLS IN FLORIDA: Australian's Jim Nicholls is in the US for a stint as the croquet pro at the Ponte Vedra Club in Tallahassee, Florida. Check out his Croquet Pro #01 and Croquet Pro #02 blog posts for his take on the visit so far. 

2016 Most Popular Croquet YouTube Channels

Since posting this ranking for 2015, there have been some changes in the landscape. First off, YouTube is allowing channels to hide their total view count and several channels from last year's list have obscured that count. I'm not sure why, but the remedy for 2016 is to rank the channels by subscribers.
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2015 Most Popular Croquet YouTube Channels

One of the quietly growing segments for the sport of croquet on the internet is YouTube. The traffic is still minor compared to the crazy videos that will notch views in the millions, but the overall segment of YouTube channels that Croquet Network tracks has grown from 12 to 18 since the start of 2014. And the total views for that group has gone from 434,000 to 603,000 during the same timeframe.
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Morning Coffee: Fear of Golf Croquet

Visit the storeLast week I mentioned that Johnny Mitchell would take over as USCA President for Eugene Young. I failed to mention that the actual transition will take place in March. Young will have served for three years. Now, this week's headlines ...

FEAR OF GC: Croquet World Online has a forum this week on the battle between golf croquet and association croquet. Or is it a battle at all--
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