I spent today at Paraparumu – a 4 lawn club with the top two lawns running around 10 seconds and the bottom two around 11 seconds. Regrettably, players partners and other spectators were banned from using the clubhouse. This is not the sort of hospitality that Croquet New Zealand expects from host clubs.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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!
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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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The 2017 USCA 9 Wicket Nationals played out in a beautiful setting along the Missouri River at English Landing Park in Parkville, Missouri, in hot for September conditions on extremely challenging turf. It was estimated that 16 players participated in doubles and singles in Championship and First Flight over September 22-24, 2017.
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