Junior Mallets SCHOOLS CHAMPIONSHIP 2026
By Joel Taylor
The 2026 National Schools Championship was hosted again by Surbiton and featured 30 players from 4 schools: Radley College, Abingdon School, Winchester College and Hayesfield Girls' School. Like last year, the tournament contained two events, singles and doubles. The singles was a flexible swiss and the doubles was run as a straight knockout with knocked-out players joining the swiss. All games were played level 14 point on half lawns, which allowed a total of 54 games to be played. As always, with so many youngsters enjoying their day of croquet, the real winner was croquet. But in a more competitive sense, Radley was dominant on the court. The Radley programme has grown steadily in the past few years. They have at least 7 courts at school and hold an internal doubles tournament which this year involves 90 pairs. The standard of their croquet was noticeably better this year and if that trend continues then the future of England croquet could be very bright indeed. The singles winner was Oliver Smiley from Radley winning all four of his games. Honourable mentions to Ricky Xia (Radley) who won 5 out of 6, losing only to Smiley; and Oliver Kang (Winchester) who won 4 out of 5, losing only to Smiley. A special mention must also be made of Hanna Laganowska Black (Hayesfield) who at 13 was both the youngest and the only female player in the event. She was a picture of serenity on the lawn and despite this being her first national schools championship she was very competitive in all her games. The semi finalists in the doubles were all from Radley and the final pitted twin brothers against each other. The final was a very tense and close match all the way to the end. At 6 & 6 v 6 & peg, Will Cordle and Austin Barnes purported to peg out their opponents' peg ball, which resulted in a ball wrongly removed from the game. Neither pair realised the error, but the Radley coach felt that in the interests of fairness, the error should be rectified, so he stepped in, reminded the players of the rules and replaced the balls. It probably did not change the outcome of the match and in
the end Jerome Barnes and Henry Terry (Radley) lifted the trophy. All players learnt something about the game and about themselves. Hopefully next year's event can feature a wider range of schools. Anyone of school age is eligible to compete, so look out for the 2027 event. Thanks
to my Assistant Manager, Adam
Swinton, and to the teachers and parents
who gave up their Sunday to bring the students to the tournament.
www.croquetengland.org.uk | 20
Made with FlippingBook - Online magazine maker