The standards for blogs on this site have been set pretty high. I'll try to keep up. I've been thinking if I should start with tackling a difficult issue or go for something light-hearted and in the end I decided to go for the latter

Wintertime is a pretty quiet time for minigolfers in the Czech Republic. The time for talks about changing our system of playing is still a few weeks, if not months, away. Most of our courses are covered in snow and there aren't any official tournaments scheduled.

But for those who don't want to hibernate there are still options. One of them is taking part in tournaments abroad, which is for most of us too expensive and time-consuming, so very few people do that and even they choose maybe just one or two events. The other option is to play on one of two (yes, TWO in the whole country) indoor courses. In the end most players choose to put their balls and putter in the closet for a few months and live a different life.

But there are some who don't want to give up their favorite pastime. These enthusiasts can get together once a month to spend their Saturday playing for the "Hanácký cup" or stock up on coffee for "Děčín marathon" in February.

One of the things discussed lately was that many girls and ladies who play minigolf end up dating and/or marrying another player. And thus a new idea was born, to organize the first unofficial Czech championships for couples of the romantic kind. This event will take place this Saturday in Přerov, one of the two aforementioned indoor courses where "Hanácký Cup" series are played. To make it more attractive, a parallel competition is organized for family pairings of parents or grandparents and children playing in the schoolboys or junior categories, because minigolf seems to be running in the families, too

This phenomenon might be caused by the amount of time minigolf eats up in our lives. It's difficult to combine minigolf with career, family and social life. After all, there are only 24 hours in a day and 7 days in a week. So unless we want to lose any of those and still want to play minigolf, the obvious choice is to combine them. The very unofficial statistics for the Czech Republic says that almost half of the girls and ladies (we're counting them because there's far less female players than male ones) are involved with another player.

That in my opinion is a pretty impressive number. I wonder how many of them will dust off their putters and show up this Saturday?