CROQUET NEWS:  It's Brain Over Brawn on the Sporting Lawn

13 November 2007
Tauranga, New Zealand
story by Kelly Exeby in Bay of Plenty Times, Tauranga, New Zealand
photo by Chris Callinan in Bay of Plenty Times, Tauranga, New Zealand

Jarrod Coutts in action.

For a kid who lives his life at 100kmh, rarely sitting still, a croquet lawn is the last place you'd expect to find Nelson teenager Jarrod Coutts.

Coutts, who lists softball and basketball as his other sports and holds down two after-school jobs to pay for his croquet travel, is part of a growing trend of teenagers picking up the mallet.

"A teacher volunteered me to play every Friday for a few hours a couple of years back and, after some initial scepticism, I was hooked," the Year 11 Nayland College student said yesterday.

Coutts finished third in the four-day Gordon Smith Golf Croquet Invitation championship, the first-ever national golf croquet event to be held in Tauranga. Mount Maunganui's Duncan Dixon, 19, won all 11 of his round-robin matches to take the title.

Each match was played on the best of three games and Dixon lost just two games in four days to blitz his opposition, with New Plymouth's Bill Heapy pipping Coutts on countback to take runner-up, winning one more game.

The Croquet New Zealand competition involved 12 invited players from as far away as Otago and Nelson.

Coutts, who has also been a Sir Peter Blake ambassador to environmental conferences in Japan and the United States, is a representative softballer in Nelson but traded the hustle of the diamond for the genteel croquet rink, where brain trumps brawn.

"Softball and basketball satisfy my need for physical exercise, but I find I'm challenged mentally by croquet — the appeal for me is that it's a supreme thinking sport, full of tactics," said Coutts, who won a national golf croquet title last year. "How many other sports will I be able to play for another 60 years and be in my prime for 40 of those years?"