Author: Joe King

A field of 6 competed in the CA May Short Croquet Tournament held at Blewbury. Tony Mayer from Swindon joined Carol, Paul, Peter, Steve and myself for the all-play-all event. The weather was perfect with clear skies and almost no wind. The lawns were playing well and we completed 5 rounds of 75 minute games finishing at about 6:30.

I ran out the eventual winner with 4 wins out of 5, tied with Carol who also had 4 wins. The first tie breaker was who-beat-who, and in a very close game with Carol earlier in the day I had overtaken Carol by 1 hoop in my final turn of the game. So I just managed to prevail on this occasion.

Paul then presented one of the new engraved ‘trophy’ glasses the Club has procured for our CA tournaments this season.

Philippa and Elizabeth provided an excellent lunch which rounded off a lovely occasion. Many thanks to them both.

The final scoresheet was:

Joe King, Manager

We are heading towards the end of the regular summer season with the finals of the Prebendal Manor Cup being played this Saturday (25th). As we have done in the last few years, we will, be starting the Autumn maintenance immediately thereafter, whilst the turf is warm enough for the grass to thrive through the various treatments.

We have experienced excellent playing conditions on the lawns this year, and our lawns have become widely known in croquet circles as some of the best around. This is the result of careful ‘greens keeping’ by Chris Bateman, tireless mowing and hole filling by John Garnett, Mick Moore and Duncan Sinclair, and the regular annual maintenance programmes. So we want to maintain this quality and our Autumn programme is again designed to do exactly that.

Maintenance

The scope of the Autumn maintenance is slightly broader this year. There will be moss and fertiliser treatments applied alongside the chafer grub spray to keep the lawn in good condition. As in previous years we will be carrying out a thorough scarification to tease out some of the remaining thatch. We anticipate that the lawns will be closed for around 2 weeks, in order for them to recover after the processes have been applied. This will take us into the first half of October.

Levelling

We are all aware that some hills and troughs have begun to develop in certain (and sometimes critical) areas. We want to start to address those and so a new feature is that plan to apply some top dressing selectively. This will begin to address some of the worst troughs identified by the recent lawns survey and in time will even things out. There will be a fuller report on the survey presented at the AGM in October. As this will likely require some time for the treated area to grow through/assimilate the top dressing, we will likely focus on one lawn so that the other can reopen first.

I’ll update the website with information as to the progress and the likely reopening dates for the lawn(s) for play.

Equipment

During the lawns closure the hoops are going to be sand-blasted and resprayed to remove the rust and to return them to a pristine condition.

If you want any more information please contact me.

Joe King

Some of you will have noticed some changes to the club calendar, which are designed to make it more reliable and secure. Quite a number of you have already navigated your way with the new calendars in the days since the changes went live. Things have seemingly been working smoothly and I’m not aware of any operational issues. But if you encounter an issue then I’d be very pleased to hear about it.

The changes are:

• Club events which book the lawns are now all in ‘full green’, and are set up by the club committee, with sign-ups enabling members to register for them. Club events are club sessions and home matches. We have tried to choose colours which work well for normal sighted and CVD users.
• Personal bookings are introduced in two new calendars (one for each lawn) and now in a grey-green. All members can make personal bookings. The slightly different colours also means you can spot personal bookings easily.
• Maintenance is unchanged and White lining should still be booked and entered at the time it is going to be done.
• Other events is now committee meetings, away matches and other activities – and which do not require a lawn allocation.

In terms of why we’ve made these changes. They will:

• Stop email addresses of members being exposed to public users in the sign-ups for events
• Prevent club sessions being inadvertently edited by members trying to sign-up to a session
• Still enable team captains from other clubs to see match fixtures on our calendar

The calendar has two limitations which I would draw to your attention:

• We cannot stop overlapping events as the system is quite clever enough for that. So we can end up with a personal booking accidently overlapping a maintenance session or club event.
• If you need to make an a full day booking there is an option to do that. However, since these aren’t very obvious (they’re posted right at the top of the day they apply to) there have been some overbookings made on top of all day bookings. I would therefore suggest avoiding using the all-day bookings option, but rather make a booking from 9-18 or 9-21 or whatever is required as that will be clearer that the lawns are not available.

I hope everything continues to work smoothly for you.