Today we turned our winter lawns by 90°, enlarged them and re-positioned all our hoops. 11 of the club chaps turned out and spent about three hours measuring, unwinding string, winding string, marking, painting, drilling, hammering, swearing and finally … playing!
It started out on Wednesday locating the 16 corners for our new lawns. Each lawn is a rectangle 105 feet x 84 feet. We (more or less) created the required four massive rectangles to within an inch or so. The only minor impediment was a hail storm that briefly turned the lawns white.
On Thursday, in addition to the four large lawns we created two half-lawns, to be used for Short Croquet club play and matches. At times you could barely see the grass for the hoops.
Each hoop has two sets of holes, one for regular club play and the others we keep for ‘best’ to be only used for competitions and matches against other clubs. The hoops are set with a clearance of about one-eight of an inch either side of the ball. Over the winter we have been blessed with somewhat wider hoops, very popular with the membership as they have been easy to run. Championship hoops are often set with one sixty-fourth of an inch clearance, so it could be worse!
Tomorrow morning our ground-keepers are booked to mark the new white lines. We have started them off with some neat corner-painting.
… and here is the motley crew who undertook all this work. Well done chaps, see you in the Autumn when we do it all again.
Today’s work in numbers…
- 16 lawn corners precisely located
- 48 winter hoop holes filled-in (plus four centre-peg holes)
- 96 summer hoop holes drilled (plus another 24 for the half-lawns) and twelve centre peg holes
- 36 hoops hammered in, most of them vertical!
- 11 mugs of tea
- an unquantifiable amount of biscuits