The tournament opened with fine weather: mostly sunny and moderately breezy all day. With ground still damp from the recent rain, the notorious Atkins hoops are quite easy to run, up to a moderate angle. Conditions are most challenging at Plimmerton, with extreme variation in pace and significant slopes. Unsurprisingly, this is where games have been longest, and three games are pegged down.
Read MoreClarke: Plenty of Upsets on Day One #02
After visiting all five venues on yesterday's practice day, I spent most of day one at Waikanae with a short visit to Plimmerton in the early afternoon.
Waikanae is the furthest venue at about one hours drive outside Wellington and has a pretty five lawn club. The front four lawns are soft, green and over-watered, running at 10.8 seconds whilst lawn 5 is an excellent lawn with different grass and firmer subsoil, running at 12.2 seconds.
Read MoreSoo: AC Worlds Player Journal #01
Just getting to Wellington proved challenging on a stormy Thursday, when many flights had to abort approaches into the airport and divert to Christchurch, and other flights were simply cancelled. Luckily for us our flight made it in on a rather exciting first approach.
Read MoreClarke: 2018 AC Worlds Preview
The 2018 WCF Association Croquet World Championship starts this Saturday in Wellington, NZ. Five clubs are being used and I’ll try to send photos from each of them as the event progresses. There are eight blocks of 10 players with the top four qualifying for the knockout from each block, with ties on wins being broken with play-off games, so net points are irrelevant.
Read More2017 Croquet News Volume 3 Digital Edition
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Through the efforts of the USCA Management Committee and President Sara Low, I am pleased to announce that the 2017 Volume 3 issue of the Croquet News magazine is now available as a true digital edition and open to the public. A full intro is below, but the timing is perfect as this overdue edition is a tribute to the 40-year anniversary for the USCA. We are incredibly pleased to provide this issue to everyone who shares a passion for the sport. The print copies are on press and should be starting the mail process for USCA members next week.
White Wins Florida GC Regional
The National Croquet Center in West Palm Beach, Florida was the site of the 5th Annual USCA Florida Golf Croquet Tournament January 12 – 14, 2018. A record 32 players took to the lawns for three days of singles and doubles competition with a total of 119 matches played! It was wonderful to see a number of new faces enter the ranks as well as others from across the country and southern hemisphere with Lawrie Simpson of Australia traveling the farthest and logging the most frequent flyer miles!
Read More2017 Best of Croquet Network
As we roll into 2018, here's our brief annual look at the most popular articles and pages on the Croquet Network site for 2017. It's always interesting to see what rose to the top over the past year. This year the big change is that for overall content we saw the popular Backyard Warrior and Why Croquet Players Wear White articles knocked out of the top slots by the 2017 mallet directory and poll.
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