The Croquet Grading System Explained

In Croquet , D-Grades refer to an index used in the Croquet Grading System (CGS), which tracks player performance and determines rankings and covers all World Croquet Federation member countries. The D-grade is a numerical performance rating assigned to a player based on results in Association Croquet (AC) or Golf Croquet (GC) tournaments. There are separate systems for each.

When you join Sussex County Croquet Club, most often you will receive an assessment by our esteemed Handicapper, Roger Sutton. There will be no mention of D-Grades at this juncture. Although the Green Card Handicap and D-Grade Systems are independent, they are related and run contemporaneously.

When you start playing croquet and are given a handicap, you don’t automatically get a D-Grade. You are probably only playing friendlies or in club competitions and as you improve your handicap changes.

At some point you will enter a more formal competition. This could be one of our one-day competitions, inter-club team matches, a Croquet SouthEast Federation match or even a tournament in the Croquet England Fixtures Calendar. The results from any level play singles match from these types of competition will be entered into the Croquet Grading System. The first time your name is included you will be given a D-Grade based on your handicap.

As you progress in croquet, a divergence may occur between your Green Card Handicap Score, and your Dynamic Grade(D-Grade) index. This happens when you play internal matches at our club, or handicap games, which do not affect your D-Grade.

Your D-Grade becomes important when you want to enter the open fixtures in the Croquet England Fixtures Calendar. This is because Tournament Secretaries are obliged to choose entrants in descending order of D-Grade when they allocate places in these competitions; if the competition is over-subscribed your D-Grade may mean you don’t get allocated a place and you will be on the reserve list instead.

At the completion of a tournament, when all results have been entered on CroquetScores, the Tournament Manager will make a submission to the Croquet Grading System; the results will be uploaded onto the international database and your new D-Grade calculated based on whom you played and who won or lost. This may take a few days.

You can to check your D-Grade by going to the World Croquet Rankings website at rank.worldcroquet.org Select AC or GC.

You now have four alternative ways to view your rankings.

• Ranking List- from the drop-down menu choose UK. Now scroll down to your approximate ranking to find your listing.
• Event List - from the menu choose England. Look for the date of the tournament, and then the name.
• List of Events by Event name - choose England
• Player full record - here you can look back in time to previous year's D-Grades

Paul Green