Croquet vs Golf: The Game Golfers Take Up Next

For a golfer in his late seventies, it is rarely the swing. The swing is still fine. It is the walk between the fifth green and the sixth tee, the one that climbs a small rise he used to barely notice. By the back nine, the right knee is finished. He loves the game. He loves the blokes he plays it with. He just cannot do five hours of it anymore.

That story is common enough in Queensland that Golf club membership in Australia spent two decades in decline before rebounding sharply from 2020; the sport now sits at record participation levels. But the demographic reality inside traditional club golf has not changed. The average Australian golfer is male, over sixty, and belongs to a demographic that is slowly shrinking. Cartilage wears. Hips stiffen. A full round asks the body for torque, rotation and eight to ten kilometres of walking. For a lot of older players, the maths stops adding up.

This page is for them. Not for a case against golf. Golf is a superb game. But if your body or your budget is starting to vote against it, there is a game waiting for you that keeps most of what you loved and drops most of what hurts. It is called croquet, and Queensland has around forty affiliated clubs playing it.

Who this comparison is really for

If you are still happily playing 18 holes twice a week, this page is not aimed at you. Keep going. The evidence on golf and healthy ageing is genuinely good.

It is aimed at the player who has started doing any of the following:

• Cutting rounds from 18 holes to 9 because the second half has become punishment.
• Taking a cart more often, and resenting it.
• Skipping winter or summer depending on which season wrecks the joints worst.
• Looking at the annual fee renewal and wincing.
• Watching handicap creep upwards no matter how much practice goes in.
• Realising that the four or five hours a round now eats is four or five hours that the rest of life was quietly asking for.

If two or three of those have started to bite, the question is no longer whether to keep playing golf exactly as you've always played it. The question is what the next game is. Most golfers who make the jump wish they'd made it sooner.

The strategic game is still there

People who have never picked up a mallet assume croquet is a garden party. It is not. Association Croquet is often called "chess on grass" and the nickname is earned. You plan three and four strokes ahead. You read angles. You use one ball to move another into position for the next shot. A good break can run six hoops off a single turn, and doing it takes the same pattern-recognition and forward-planning muscles that a tidy up-and-down on a par four uses.

Golf Croquet, the faster code, is closer to match-play golf in feel. One stroke per turn. Two sides battling for the same hoop. Tactics come fast: do I run this hoop, clear my opponent, or set up my partner? A golfer's instinct for percentage play transfers directly. So does the ability to stand over a pressure shot, breathe, and hit it.

What croquet does not require is brute clubhead speed, full-body rotation through impact, or a body that tolerates 100 practice swings a week. Precision, touch and reading the ground stay. The wear and tear goes.

Physical demands: a side-by-side

The contrast is stark, and it is the reason most ex-golfers give for the switch.

Walking distance

• Golf: 8 to 10 kilometres per 18-hole round. Hills, slopes, rough ground, often in full Queensland sun.
• Croquet: A few hundred metres across a flat, manicured lawn. Most clubs measure the playing surface in the order of 25 x 32 metres.

Impact on joints

• Golf: The swing puts rotational load through hips, knees and lower back. Studies of senior golfers consistently find that hip flexor strain, gluteal weakness, early joint degeneration and low back pain are the conditions most likely to end a career.
• Croquet: A croquet swing is pendular. Shoulders and arms do the work. Feet stay planted. The Australian Physiotherapy Association has specifically noted croquet's value for people recovering from knee and hip replacements.

Time on your feet

• Golf: Four to five hours, often with minimal rest, in whatever weather the day hands you.
• Croquet: A typical club session runs one to two hours. You sit between games. You're under shade cloth between turns. Most clubs build the morning around a long tea break.

None of this means croquet is physically trivial. Two hours on your feet with steady concentration is real exercise, and there is a growing body of research showing it hits the sweet spot for balance, falls prevention and cognitive engagement in people over sixty. It just doesn't ask your knees to carry you up a hill with a bag of clubs on your back.

Cost, honestly compared

Queensland golf is cheap by international standards and expensive by club-sport standards. A full private club membership in Brisbane can run into the low thousands per year. Public course green fees in 2025 sit around $40 to $50 for a modest weekday round, $85 at mid-tier courses like Mount Coolum, and $175 or more for premium tracks. Add cart hire, balls, lessons, and the occasional new driver, and a committed golfer easily spends several thousand dollars a year.

Croquet's numbers look different. A typical Queensland club membership runs A$100 to A$300 per year. That usually includes unlimited play. Mallets are provided free to beginners and cost A$150 to A$300 to own outright if you decide to buy one. Balls and hoops belong to the club. There are no green fees, no cart hire, no golf shop.

For most ex-golfers the financial delta is the least interesting part of the comparison, but for those on a fixed pension it is often the one that makes the decision obvious.

Time per game

One 18-hole round: 4 hours 17 minutes on USGA pace-of-play guidelines, closer to 5 hours in practice.

One Golf Croquet game: 30 to 45 minutes. A full club session of two or three games plus tea: 2 to 2.5 hours door to door.

The time you get back is not trivial. A golfer who plays twice a week and switches to croquet recovers something like four hours of life per week. Most don't spend it on something else. They spend it recovering, which is why they can play more often.

The social side

This is the part nobody warns you about, and it matters. A lot of older golfers worry that leaving the club means leaving the mates. In practice, the social fabric of a Queensland croquet club is remarkably similar to a Queensland golf club: regular playing days, rolling draws, morning tea, a committee, a clubhouse, inter-club competitions, state championships for those who want them.

The difference is the demographics. Golf clubs skew roughly 80 per cent male. Croquet clubs are closer to 50/50, with women often forming a majority at the older end of the age range. Many golfing couples discover that switching to croquet is the first time in decades they've played a serious sport together, on the same lawn, at the same time.

How fast does a golfer adapt?

Faster than they expect. The stance is different, the swing is a pendulum rather than a coil, and the lawn reads differently from a green. But the core skills transfer: distance control, reading slope, picking a line, staying calm over a shot that matters. Most ex-golfers report being competitive in club-level Golf Croquet within a few months. Association Croquet takes longer to master because the strategic depth is greater, but the climb is the pleasurable kind.

The biggest adjustment is usually mental. Golf trains you to play your own ball. Croquet trains you to play everyone's ball, including your opponent's. That shift is the moment most converts say the game grabbed them.

What a first session looks like in Queensland

Every CAQ-affiliated club runs come-and-try sessions. You wear flat-soled shoes and clothes you can move in. The club provides a mallet, balls and a member who will walk you through hoop-running basics in the first ten minutes. Within half an hour you will be playing a real game, badly, and laughing about it. By the end of the session you will know whether this is your next game.

Clubs are scattered across Brisbane, the Gold Coast, the Sunshine Coast, Toowoomba, and a long line of regional towns from Cairns to the New South Wales border. The Croquet Association of Queensland maintains the full directory at croquetqld.org.

If golf is still working for you, keep playing it. If it has started to cost you more than it gives back, the game you're looking for is already set up on a lawn near you, and the first mallet is free.