While the number of North Harbour bowler at last weekend’s national fours championships in Wellington was small their performances without exception were distinguished.

 Heading the honours was the little Takapuna dynamo Anne Dorreen.

In a relatively short bowls career, not much more than a decade, she has been one of the centre’s most consistent women’s players and her deeds in Wellington were perhaps her finest to date.

 She played at lead in an otherwise all Central Otago four of Margaret O’Connor, Christine Buchanan and Linley O’Callaghan, which made the women’s final.

 They were beaten in that by a strong combination skipped by former Black Jack Mandy Boyd 20-13, but there was no disgrace in that because it was played in terrible conditions at the Hutt Valley’s Naenae club.

 The winds which often plague Wellington were at their worst making the accurate draw bowls, which are Dorreen’s speciality, virtually impossible.

 Still, just to make a national final was another feather in the Dorreen bowling cap, even if the defeat continued some slight frustrations for her this season in missing out in finals.

 Last month she was on the verge of achieving a bar for her gold star when she was in the centre triples final with Takapuna club-mates Trish Croot and Robyne Walker. But her 10^th centre title eluded her with a defeat to the threesome of Orewa’s Wendy Jensen.

 Though starting the game relatively late, the ultra fit Dorreen, who keeps in shape power walking and line dancing, has always been a high achiever. As a junior in 2010 she and her friend Rhonda Preston won the centre one-to-five year pairs with their respective husbands Graham and Tim remarkably winning the men’s pairs the same season. She then won her first centre senior singles title partnering Tim Preston in the 2011 mixed pairs. In her early seasons she was coached by one of North Harbour’s best tutors, Keith Burgess.

 Her successes have come regularly firstly with the Milford club, then for a lengthy period with Browns Bay and now with Takapuna, which is closer to her home and where for many years she was an associate member.

 She has enjoyed earlier success with Central Otago’s O’Connor and Buchanan, with whom she plays regularly during the winter months on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast. The trio in 2016 won the Auckland centre’s Trust New Zealand Open. Another major victory has been in the Birkenhead women’s pairs.

 Other top efforts at Wellington came from another two of the centre’s leading women’s players, Jensen, who is having a stellar season, and Selina Goddard. They were in a composite four which was narrowly beaten in the quarter-finals.