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About this report

The 2022 Survey of Croquet Players is the fifth in a series of five-yearly player surveys conducted by the Croquet Association (CA), enabling the CA to better understand its membership and croquet players within its domain.

The aims of the survey were:

  • To capture the current ‘state’ of croquet within the CA’s domains,
  • To measure changes over the last five years (including the pandemic),
  • To better understand diversity and inclusion in croquet,
  • To generate analysis to guide future decisions on recruitment, grant applications and sponsorship,
  • To generate analysis to improve marketing at both national and club level.

The survey was conducted between 22/03/2022 and 22/04/2022, with most participants completing the survey online. The 2022 survey team is Beatrice McGlen, Paul Brown and Eugene Chang, with support from the CA Office.

This preliminary report represents initial findings from the data ‘as is’ with very minor data cleaning - all figures are provisional at this stage. Numbers and totals reported are likely to change for the final report (due October 2022) when the complete analysis and quality assurance has taken place.

Figures in this report are “of those players responding to this survey” rather than referring to actual totals across the CA.

Please send comments, questions and feedback to communications@croquet.org.uk.

Planned analysis

The following detailed analysis is planned for the complete report:

  • Data prep: checking for duplicate entries, creating derived variables, cleaning data,
  • Considering the representativeness of the data,
  • Time series on demographics of croquet players, comparing with previous years,
  • Understanding what attracts croquet players to the sport
  • Recommendations for the CA, Federations and clubs,
  • Updating the forecast models from the 2017 survey,
  • Diversity and Inclusion,
  • Covid impacts,
  • Thematic analysis of free text comments.

Specific data caveats and more detailed analysis methodology can be found at the end of this report.

Survey response rate

There were 2269 responses including 23 paper responses. Work to identify duplicate or void responses is ongoing; at initial glance this is the largest response the CA has ever had for its player surveys.

Response figures for previous surveys are as follows:

Year Total Online Paper
2017 1455 1274 181
2012 1020 708 312
2007 716 231 485
2002 1020 NA NA

Respondent demographics

By Age and Gender

The age distribution of respondents is plotted in this section, alongside gender breakdowns by age.

Respondents were asked what year they were born. Ages were approximated by subtracting the declared year of birth from the current year (2022) - making the assumption that all respondents were born on the same date.

By Gender

By Region

Respondents were asked what region they lived in - with primary options drawn from the main CA Federations. Some respondents used the free text option to indicate residence in other countries and UK regions; these have not been included in this interim report.

Club and CA memberships

Respondents were asked about their club membership(s), and whether they were CA members; this was followed by questions exploring how they view their club(s) and the CA. In this report only the simple questions around club and CA membership is reported.

Club memberships

Travel distances to main club

Most respondents live within 25 miles of their main club; the top bar indicates NA responses.

CA membership

Croquet experiences

A range of questions were asked around respondents’ experiences playing croquet.

Primary code of croquet

Years playing croquet by main code

Respondents self-identified whether they were primarily played AC, GC, or a combination. This information is combined with the durations respondents have played croquet, to visualise the split of main code against years played croquet. This shows that whilst those playing croquet longer have a wider composition of AC and GC players, those who have played <20 years are significantly outnumbered by those who consider themselves GC players..

Years having membership of croquet club

Covid impacts on croquet

As the first survey of croquet players since the pandemic, several questions looked to gauge Covid impacts on croquet.

Cost of croquet

Respondents were asked how much the cost of croquet was to them. Further analysis of these questions will help understand potential barriers to entry or subsequent progression.

Club subs

Analysis methodology

This preliminary analysis was carried out using the open source analysis lanaguage R and its associated packages.

The methodology for the full report will be assessed independently outside the survey team.

For more details on the methodology, please contact the survey team.

Assumptions and data corrections/caveats

  • Assumption 1: all data submitted by respondents was correct and that data entry has been correct (corrections have gradually taken place as errors discovered). E.g. Initial work has been undertaken to check for data discrepancies - e.g. those declaring as U18 whilst stating a birth year before 2004.

  • Assumption 2:Each each response is from a unique respondent; further checks will be undertaken to double check this.

  • Corrections 1:: A number of comments from various free text questions have been recoded and simplified to aid analysis.

  • Corrections 2: Imputed some data where reasonable to do so - e.g. taken midpoints, taken upper limit of range.

  • Suppression: To preserve anonymity and reduce identifiability of individuals from the data, responses are presented in groups where possible.