SMEATON is a beautiful little country bowling club.
With a volcanic mound rising up in the background, surrounded by fields, the fantastic green and old-school clubrooms just make you want to grab a drink and have a roll.
And if you have ever visited the Ballarat Regional Bowls Association club, there is a fair chance you will have bumped into Winston Pickering.
The 68-year-old has been the club secretary for a decade.
"I don't intend to beat Claire Cleary who did 25 years with the ladies _ I don't think I'll try and beat that," he said.
"But I'm also on the match committee and assistant treasurer _ plenty of jobs."
While he enjoys being an integral part of the club, he is considering relinquishing his role as secretary.
"I'm thinking seriously about (giving it away) in the next year or two," Pickering said.
"We've got a lady doing the ladies now and she could take over in a couple of years and do a good job of it.
"But there's a lot of work with it.
"You don't realise how much work there is until you start doing it _ but you've got to enjoy it to do it."
The whole time he has been doing the hardest job at a club, he has also been doing the most thankless one _ a selector.
"Match committees can be very difficult at times," the retiree said.
"I reckon I've done 20 years over the years I've been playing.
"It does get a bit heated at times with blokes thinking they should be playing a bit higher up and that."
Pickering thinks the recent unification of the men's and women's associations at state level is ultimately a good thing but he has one major concern.
"The thing that worries our club the most is if they ever change the districts _ they've had two goes at sending us to Midlands Association already _ but seeing as all our players are south of the club it would ruin our club altogether," the veteran of about 600 pennant games said.
"That is our only worry.
"We've fought it twice and won. With the new system we're hoping they'll honour it and leave us where we are."
Since the Smeaton faithful come from as far south as Gordon, it is a valid concern about having to travel up to places like Dunolly.
"I think we've only got four men north of the green and three of them are within 200m.
"Most of them come from as far as Gordon _ Kingston, Allendale, Newlyn, Creswick and Ballarat down to Gordon.
"(The member from Gordon) had the Kingston Hotel, Peter Kersley, and he started playing with us and he's never ever gone anywhere else _ a good member."
Pickering won the president's handicap back in 1972-73 in his very first season of bowls and also finished runner-up to his brother, Ian, in the club championship once.
But he rates the back-to-back premierships in 1997-98 and '98-99 as the highlight _ taking the side up from division five to four and then three in the process.
Like so many bowlers before him, he filled in once and has never looked back.
"I think my neighbour Steve Tennant, one day about 12pm, he rang up and said, `We're short, can you play?'
"I played cricket up until then and I gave cricket away that year, and I went straight on the green and never had a bowl in my hand before that.
"And I kept playing after that."
It was the challenge that hooked him.
"Every time you go out on the green it's a challenge _ the greens aren't always the same and the weather's not the same, so you've got different challenges every time you walk out."
But he feels the narrow bowls have taken some of those challenges away.
"I'm not a big believer in them but I've had to go along with them."
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