Our first two entrants for this years Australian Gateball Championships were the Capricorns and Pine Rivers. Read their stories below. Other teams entering the AGC are invited to send similar stories.

Capricornians

The Capricornians entering this year’s AGC is a mixed team comprising two players from each of the three CQ clubs, Capricorn Coast [Robyn Lyon, Kathleen Hayes], Gracemere [Peter Kajewski, RoseAnne Mathewsen] and Rockhampton [Steve and Cheryl Kele].

We have only been playing Gateball at Capricorn Coast for just under two years. Greg Featherstone has been an able and willing coach. So far, the  Capricorn Coast team has competed at the Rockhampton Gateball Challenge in 2018 and 2019 and the State Championships  in Rockhamptonton in 2018. We travelled south to play at Caloundra in 2018 and won five games there. This year we competed at McIlwraith for the first time. 

We average about eight players each club play day on Wednesday mornings from 8-10am.

The team which competed at McIlwraith 2019. L to R Kath Hayes, Lyn Christiansen, Greg Featherstone, Lyn Hanlon and Robyn Lyon.

Pine Rivers

In early March this year some gateball enthusiasts, welcomed by Secretary Carolyn Ribone and President Sep Hines, joined the happy membership at Pine Rivers Croquet Club in the north of Brisbane. With some equipment loaned from the ACA (through John Park) and CAQ ( via Barbara Northcott) we held some demonstration games in early March. Sep was clever enough to make some additional equipment and we were blessed to have a dedicated gateball green marked out by the wonderful volunteer greenkeepers.

After only a few games some of the members were hooked on gateball and by the end of March, Pine Rivers entered their first gateball competition at McIlwraith. Max and Judy Stringer had previously never played in a gateball tournament but learned quickly and played exceptionally well. Their experience in Ricochet made their transition look easy! Thrilled with a few wins and a wonderful day out, the news spilled over to other members of how much fun gateball is.

In early June, Pine Rivers competed at the Ipswich tournament, winning 5 out of 8 matches under the captaining of Emma Mauceri and Warren Dowse. This time, Robert Roose and Sep Hines joined the competition team for the first time. Again, it was easy to see how their ricochet skills transferred to gateball. An impressive 4^th place at this event encouraged the team to enter more competitions.

Pine Rivers team at Ipswich Tournament – Robert Roose, Judy Stringer, Emma Mauceri, Max Stringer, Warren Dowse, Sep Hines, Keith Chur-Hansen and Grayce Dowse.

On the 15^th June at the Brisbane North Regional Doubles Gateball tournament, Max and Robert placed 2^nd and Judy and Sep placed 3^rd. A fantastic result given the amount of time they have all been playing.

Max Stringer and Robert Roose – 2nd Place in the Brisbane North Region Gateball Doubles Event

Robert Roose, Sep Hines, Max Stringer and Judy Stringer at the Brisbane North Region Gateball Doubles Event

We have just started planning for our adventure to the Australian Gateball Championship to be held in Victoria in November this year and look forward to meeting more gateball enthusiasts from around the globe.

We are all looking forward to playing and learning more together as a team and encouraging more people to come and play gateball with us.

On the 1^st & 2^nd June Ipswich Gateball Club held our annual competition.  

We had a very successful event and once again had a maximum of 10 teams competing.   This enabled us to have two full days of team competition.  Our grounds are very fast as we play at the local North Ipswich Bowls Club.  This always proves to be a challenge for a lot of our players especially if it is their first experience with a bowls club surface.  

We are a small club and it was a pleasure to welcome  so many teams and have the club house filled with happy gateballers.  We thank them all for their support.

The winning team this year was Redcliffe Roses with 7 wins out of 9 and we congratulate them on a fine effort.  Coming in second place was our own Ipswich Team again with 7 wins.  Our patron Cheryl  Bromage presented the awards to both teams.  All teams achieved at least one win each.

We usually try to do things a little differently in Ipswich and attempt to make our events all inclusive and this proves to be a successful formula.  Each year we give an encouragement award or mystery prize.  This is our way of saying thank you to the many teams competing, because without them we wouldn’t be able to hold such a successful event.  This year we had five young players across the teams.  Most of these young people have not been playing long, so we decided to divide our encouragement award between them.  We hope that they will continue to enjoy the game as they become more proficient.

Our thanks as always must go to our volunteers who do such a magnificent  job of catering for us over the two days.  We also thank all teams for competing and helping to make the competition the success that  it was.