Results – The Grove Orewa BNH Women’s Fours – 29th & 30th March 2025

Lisa Dickson and Lauren Mills collected their third centre title for the season when they were part of a Birkenhead four which won The Grove Orewa Bowls North Harbour Women’s Fours championship at Birkenhead at the weekend.  They teamed up with skip Millie Nathan and lead Connie Mathieson to beat Manly’s Margaret Eames, Trish Croot, Judy Smith and Kathy Stephens 14-4 in Sunday’s final.

Earlier this season Lisa and Lauren, in Takapuna colours, won the pairs championship and with Birkenhead’s Millie the triples. Sunday’s win thus has given Lauren her North Harbour gold star for five titles, to go along-side the gold star she has won in Northland centre.  Lisa now has 23 Harbour titles and for Millie and Connie it was their seventh.

Ironically enough, because Lisa, Lauren and Connie are also Takapuna members, the Birkenhead four started the tournament with a loss to their Takapuna club-mates, Keiko Kurohara, Adele Ineson, Jacqui Belcher and Jan Calcott, with Keiko an inspiration at skip.  The Takapuna-Birkenhead symbiotic connection was also enhanced by the fact Adele and Jacqui are both former Birkenhead members.  The early defeat prompted a change in the Nathan line-up with Lauren going to three and Lisa to two, where the latter proved most effective, and with two wins they comfortably qualified, to reassert themselves in post-section.

Keiko’s four, by contrast, after finishing as top qualifiers, went out early in post-section well beaten by Helensville’s Joy Connell, Suzanne Hart, Sharon Parker and Jeni Hart, who in the semi-final lost 14-6 to Nathan’s Birkenhead four.  The Manly lineup of Eames, Croot, Smith and Stephens in post-section ousted another Manly combination of Irene Donaldson, Maureen Howden, Helen Briant and Jan Harrison and then in the semi-finals toppled the Mairangi Bay four of Elaine McClintock, Kerin Roberts, Judi Farkash and Hanaan Shahwan 14-3.

Just as one Manly team had eliminated another from that club, the same happened when the McClintock Mairangi four had a surprisingly easy 12-5 quarter-final win over what many might have considered a likely finalist in Mairangi’s successful four of recent seasons, Sheryl Wellington, Jan Gledhill, Colleen Rice and Theresa Rogers.

Reversals of form and results were a highlight of a tournament, in which the only disappointment was a small entry of 13 teams, with just five missing post-section.