Junior Mallets Welcome to Junior Mallets, celebrating the fun, friendships and competitions of our young people.
JUNIOR MENTORING WEEKEND By Hanna LB (13), Bath Croquet Club Hi, my name is Hanna and I’m from Bath Croquet Club. I’m just starting my third season and I play GC and AC. This month I went to a junior mentoring weekend kindly hosted by Nottingham Croquet Club. The lawns there were excellent and I got to play croquet with kids from all over the country, including Cheltenham, High Wycombe and Woking. The main goal of the weekend was to improve our croquet skills, but it became much more than just that! We began by practising our aiming and accuracy when hitting a ball and then worked on our GC clearances. We then played a variety of competitive mini-games including skittles and multi-hoop, which were great fun. It was then time for lunch, and the food was excellent. There were jacket potatoes, salads and some delicious cheesecake. Afterwards, we practised our AC ratio shots as well as our split shots. To round off the day we played the frenzied game of gateball, which was really good fun. Sunday dawned bright and clear, and we kicked the day off by practising our AC hoop approaches and pioneer placement, followed by a short alternate stroke doubles game. We then played racing croquet in teams. I thought gateball was fast and furious, but racing croquet took things to another level. As a team we managed to win half of our games, which I thought was good, particularly as we were competing against our mentors. We then broke for yet another fabulous lunch, however it started to first rain, then hail and the afternoon’s play sadly had to be called off. I found the weekend great fun and it was a super opportunity to meet and make friends with other juniors and develop our croquet skills together. It would be good if there were more opportunities like this for juniors in croquet, especially for clubs where there aren’t many junior players.
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