The tournament was held between 5th to 9th of June 2024. The weather was a mixture of sun and cloud with just a couple of short patches of drizzle, but there was a chilly wind throughout. The tournament consisted of 2 events as follows (players handicaps shown in brackets):
Handicap singles
There were 6 entrants so this was played as a straight forward all play all block. I (6) won 2 of my games so ended top around the middle of the block. I played quite well and 2 of the games I lost by quite a small margin (20-21 and 19-22). The winner was Stephen Tetlow (5) from Budleigh Salterton CC who won all of his games.
Level-play singles
There were only 12 players so not really enough to split us into “classes”. The handicaps ranged from -0.5 to 6 so those of us at the higher end of that range were playing some games we were guaranteed to loose other than by some kind of miracle. This proved to be the case as I only won 3 of my 8 games. In the first game I (6) played quite well to beat Chris Donovan (2.5) by 18-9. After that I didn’t play so well and only managed to win 2 more games on the final day, both against players with handicaps of 4.5. However, it turned out that 3 wins was the best of the “high handicappers” with 3 of us achieving it. As there was such a wide handicap range, and nobody played everyone, it was decided that the best way to decide the winner of the high handicappers was with a corner 4 play-off where each of the 3 players play with 2 balls from corner 4 and try to score as many hoops as possible starting with hoop 4. I managed 3 hoops but the other two only managed 1 hoop so I was declared the winner. The overall winner was Roger Mills (1) from Sidmouth.
So I had a very enjoyable 5 days of AC croquet (about 39 hours of play).
