Contact the adviser, Alan

Croquet is an ideal sport for everyone. It’s played outdoors in gardens or on lawns. Players walk (never run) between the six iron hoops and a round stick (the peg) placed in the middle of the court while they strike coloured balls through the hoops in a specified order. The mallets vary in length and weight according to the height, size and way of playing of the individual player.  Flat shoes are needed to get started but no other special clothes are needed.

If you are reading this you are also likely to be a u3a member or friend and hopefully able to bring the easy camaraderie of u3a groupings to croquet teamwork and competition. Both my current and previous croquet clubs host local u3a visitor groups on a regular basis. The croquet clubs benefit from the new blood and approaches and the u3a groups learn a challenging, age-appropriate sport.

No; not at all. I play throughout the year although I skip my usually weekly play when there is frost or snow or the weather is very wet. Some croquet clubs do stop play by September. This is usually because they have lawns with  high clay content soils underneath. This feature tends to rule out winter croquet for their members because of very muddy under-foot conditions during prolonged rainy periods. Winter croquet at these clubs would be unpleasant were it tried; but it won’t in fact be attempted at all because of the need to avoid serious damage to playing surfaces.  It follows that u3a based croquet activity groups could have a valuable role to play if they are  able to travel to each other and so link the diversity of playing surfaces available at local clubs and recreation areas. My own club and several others in the south-east region manage to avoid a winter closure by reserving special lawns for winter play. 

I regard croquet as the queen of sports,with its demand for exacting manual performance, its usual stimulation of rich accompanying social events, its keen intellectual demands as you try to outwit your opponents and its constantly evolving ways of playing. There are at least three main ways of setting up croquet games each with contrasted rules and aims. These are: Garden Croquet; Association Croquet; and Golf Croquet. In my croquet career I have played all these different modes. Being able to play very different types of croquet with the same equipment contributes greatly to my excited response to the sport. So many possible ways to maintain the fun of the croquet lawn!

I started playing croquet before I was twenty, as an undergraduate playing on College lawns with other students. We played what has usually been termed “Garden Croquet”, using footpaths as our lawn boundaries and having great fun as we sent opponent balls into the rough grass and shrubberies. I remember it as an activity which could be  simultaneously decorous and relaxing  while also, from time to time, outrightly aggressive (yet this was always in a civilised manner). I subsequently played similar croquet in friends’ gardens in Australia  and then in my own garden when I lived for some years in the United States. In America the acquisition of a croquet set of hoops, balls and mallets for play in the yard is commonplace, cheap enough and easily  purchased through a mail order company.

When I returned to the UK it was to the Brighton and Sussex areas. Here I joined well-established croquet clubs. Their lawns are carefully mown and marked with white lines; these now serve as the boundary markers in place of the bushes, trees and  pathways that had served the more informal sites I had used for Garden Croquet. I found that my undergraduate croquet was now highly refined with very detailed rules and now officially known as Association Croquet.

Golf Croquet

I also encountered a totally new game being played at these clubs. It  is called Golf Croquet. Its practitioners  make much of the precise boundaries of the painted white lines on the lawn and of running hoops at speed. It is a version of croquet which is easy to learn and newcomers can begin to play a match and enjoy it within an afternoon or morning. It is now the most popular of the varieties of croquet. If a Singles Golf Croquet match is being played each of the two players will take two balls. In Doubles matches - with of course four players - each competitor plays only one ball. Together, the players in a match proceed around a prescribed circuit of hoops and try in turn to run the next hoop in the sequence. When a player has run the hoop they count it in their score and the whole set of players then moves on to the next hoop  in the circuit.

If you need advice on play or on setting up a Croquet Group in your own please contact me using the form below. 

Contact the adviser, Alan