Something good is on its way from Caloundra. Murray Tinker has built a set of free croquet visualisers that run in a web browser, and they cover all three codes. We have had an early look, and it is worth getting excited about.

If the name rings a bell, it should. Murray won the Australian Golf Croquet Men’s Singles in 2017, and these days he is club captain at Caloundra Mallet Sports Club. We have told the story of the champion and his title run on its own. Read the profile Now he has pointed that same eye for the game at something new.

What Murray has built is a coaching tool. You drop the balls on the lawn, aim along a power line, and play the shot out, and they behave the way they do on real grass, with none of the perfect right angles you only ever get on paper.

You can draw straight onto the lawn with arrows and circles, mark the spot where you want a ball to finish, and record a sequence then replay it slowly while you talk through each shot. Anyone who coaches, or who has ever tried to explain a tactic with words and a bit of hand-waving, will see where this is going.

The breadth is the part that surprised us. It covers golf croquet and association, and it does gate ball as well, the ten-ball game from Japan, laid out properly with its three gates and centre goal pole.

Gate ball, set up with all ten balls, the three gates and the centre pole.

A 3D version is taking shape too, with a lawn you can spin around and view from any angle.

The 3D version, still taking shape.

It started, in Murray's own words, when he set out to make better videos and “got carried away.” He has had a hand from Gemini AI on the building of it, and his own knowledge of the game has gone into everything else.

It is still in development, and Murray is refining it almost by the day. That is the best reason to keep an eye on this space.

We will bring you updates from Murray as the tools come together, and when they are ready for everyone to use, we will point you straight to them. For now, here is a taste of what one of our own has made.