The Videocam Experiment

Good for What Ails Your Game

Click here to skip the bull and go right to the videos!

Keen to test the video capabilities of his new Casio EX-Z750 camera, which is the size of a deck of cards, your humble webmaster decided to videotape himself running breaks in practice. My hope was that by artificially increasing performance anxiety during practice, I would become so inured to pressure that I would be imperturbable during tourneys. But God took this opportunity to remind your webmaster of His delightful sense of humor, and for the first few weeks, your webmaster succeeded only in spreading the cancer of “choking” from tournaments to the practice lawn! Then I got used to being “on camera” and began two-balling in earnest.

Two-ball breaks are the easiest to conceptualize, but the most difficult to execute. They do absolutely nothing for your understanding of strategy, but do wonders for your rushes, approach shots, and wicket shots. These skills are so important that I developed a two-ball routine that I use at the end of every practice. Starting in corner 4, rush your partner ball to wicket 1 and see how many wickets you can run. If you are good enough to run 12 hoops, then you can set a rush for your partner ball to wicket 1 and begin all over again. My best effort to date is 19 wickets without a bisque. My goal is to get both balls all the way around and peg out without a bisque.

It remains to be seen whether this exercise will improve my tournament play, but I have learned a few useful things:

• Two-balling is damned difficult, and should be viewed as what it is: a last resort.
• When you practice with only two balls for hours at a time for weeks on end, suddenly three- and four-ball breaks seem an impossible luxury. This tonic alone does much to redeem the hours of difficult practice.
• Success at two-ball breaks is not about making perfect shots. It's about recovering gracefully from your inevitable errors. See my setup shots for 2-, 3- and 4-back when I'm going around with the first ball on my “19 wickets” video; I had to recover from some egregious errors to keep my break alive.
• Long roll shots are a matter of focus. With practice, you will learn how to make them consistently. The goal is to increase the radius of your “comfort zone” around a wicket.
• The only region of the wicket that is impossible to make a decent setup shot from is directly in front of the hoop on the non-playing side. You will never get a decent rush from there, and the closer you are to it, the wider the angle you'll have to use to take position. (Never go to position through the hoop.)
• It takes two hours to warm up. This may seem an exaggeration, but it's not: all of the lengthy (double-digit) runs I had came after at least two hours of practice. Perhaps it takes that long for my fatigue to overcome my anxiety. :-)

These videos are dedicated to my friend and fellow croquet player Brett West, who is not only generous with his beautiful court, but also improved the videos by suggesting that I edit them to remove the dead air between croquet shots. The unedited videos are still posted for those who want to verify that I ran all the wickets continuously and without retries. Thanks, Brett!

	Two-Ball Break Videos
	Windows Media		Divx
Wickets	Edited 320x200 pixels	Unedited 320x200 pixels	Edited 640x480 pixels	Unedited 640x480 pixels
19 (26 w/1 bisque)	4:18	18:36	4:18	18:36
13	2:49	9:20

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Send inquiries to Ben Morehead at "info (at sign) greenwichcroquet.com".