Club

Croquet

Wrest Park

GC Referees course 22-23 August

report by Tim Brewer

Eric Audsley, George Collin, Michael Tideswell, John Watson and myself attended the GC Referees course run by Ian Shore from the Chiltern Croquet Academy, held at Wrest Park. Glynis Davies also attended the sessions on Thursday but wasn’t available to take the exams on Friday.

I am pleased to report that Eric, George, Michael, John and myself successfully passed the practical and written exams so we are now qualified GC referees. So having had no GC referees in the club up until now, we now have five! Congratulations to everyone involved. I would like to thank Ian Shore and Adrian Kirby on behalf of the club for running the course for us as an additional course to usual courses offered by the Chiltern Croquet Academy. Also, I would like to thank David Hughes (one of our new members this year) for invigilating the written examination sessions, ensuring that the candidates didn’t try to cheat.

There is a new information sheet on the pavilion noticeboard that sets out the actions to take when a wrong ball is played. The most common wrong ball errors are described in the thick edged box in the bottom half of the sheet but to use the table correctly, always work down from the top of the table to the bottom to identify which type of wrong ball situation has arisen and how to remedy it. I hope you find this useful.

I plan to run a series of mini coaching sessions at the Wednesday morning GC roll-up to highlight some areas of the game where I think some extra tuition would be helpful. I’ll let you know when the first of these sessions will be taking place, probably in the second half of September.

In the meantime, if one of the newly qualified referees are present when you are playing a game and you need a referee, then do ask them to perform that role for you.

© Wrest Park Croquet Club