"Proud moment for Bonita Bay Club," the club's own blog announced earlier this year, when its Croquet Professional landed on the cover of the sport's national magazine.
Most residents who drive past the Sports Center on the way to a tee time or a pickleball match give the croquet lawn maybe half a glance. It sits past the tennis courts, quiet most afternoons, easy to mistake for a lawn game rather than a competitive sport with its own governing body and national rankings. That impression is wrong, and the person who proves it works there.
Sherif Abdelwahab is Bonita Bay Club's Croquet Professional. He has also, over the course of more than two decades, become one of the most decorated competitors in American croquet. The United States Croquet Association's Spring 2026 issue of Croquet News put him on the cover with an in-depth profile, timed to a win that had happened just months earlier. According to Croquet Network's writeup of the issue, the feature ran "fresh off his victory at the American Six Wicket National Championship in November," a fitting spotlight on one of the game's most accomplished competitors.
That November win was not a one-off. Pull the USCA's own historical champions list and Abdelwahab's name recurs across formats and years in a way that few competitors in any sport manage:
- Golf Croquet National Championship: 2002, 2017, 2018, 2019, and 2023, five titles spanning two decades
- American Six-Wicket National Championship: 2017 and 2025
- Nine-Wicket Singles National Championship: 2021 and 2022
That is a national title in at least four different years just since 2017, on top of a first win that predates most of his current students. The USCA's own records list him winning the Golf Croquet national title for the fifth time, a phrase that undersells how rare repeat national champions are in a sport played seriously by a small, tight-knit community of clubs.
None of that happens on a lawn nobody uses. Bonita Bay Club's Sports Center houses 16 Har-Tru tennis courts, 15 pickleball courts, and a single championship croquet court, all under one roof and one membership. The croquet court gets a fraction of the daily traffic the tennis and pickleball courts see, but it is the one that produced a national champion this cycle, and the one before it, and several cycles before that. Scale and popularity are not the same measure of a club's strength, and this is the clearest example on the property.
The court also hosts real competition, not just practice. In April 2025, Bonita Bay Club served as host site for the USCA Florida Southwest District Golf Croquet tournament, a sanctioned regional event that drew players from clubs across the state for four days of championship-flight play. Abdelwahab served as tournament director for the event, the same role he plays when the club hosts sanctioned play. For a resident, that means a genuine USCA tournament, not an exhibition, has already taken place inside the gates, with results that count toward the same rankings system that puts him on national magazine covers.
What that means day to day is simpler than it sounds. The croquet court is a resident amenity like the tennis courts or the fitness center, and the person teaching there is not a generalist recreation staffer but a multi-time national champion who has spent his career at the top level of the sport. A member who has never picked up a mallet can walk over, ask the Sports Center about a lesson, and be coached by someone whose name sits on the same USCA champions list as the sport's most recognized players. A member who already plays has a training partner most clubs in the country would consider a significant recruiting win.
It also says something about how Bonita Bay Club spends its resources that has nothing to do with square footage. The club is in the middle of a much larger, well-publicized transformation, a $110 million clubhouse project approved by membership earlier this year and built in phases without shutting down existing amenities. That kind of capital project gets attention because the number is large and the renderings are dramatic. The croquet program gets almost none of that attention, and yet it is arguably the most competitively successful thing happening on the property, measured the way the sport itself keeps score.
Golf and boating are still the amenities that define Bonita Bay Club to most people, on the property and off it. Five championship golf courses across two campuses, a resident-owned marina on the Imperial River, a tennis program that brings the FineMark Women's Pro Tennis Championship back to the club's courts every spring. Those are the amenities that show up first in any conversation about the community. The croquet court rarely comes up, which is exactly why it is worth knowing about if you already live here. It is the one part of the property where the person teaching the sport is also, by the numbers, one of the best to ever play it in this country.
Next time the Sports Center newsletter mentions a croquet clinic or a club tournament, it is worth walking over, even just to watch. Championship-level croquet does not look like the backyard version most people grew up playing, and watching someone who has won a national title in three different formats work a lawn is a different kind of afternoon than a round of golf or an hour on the pickleball courts. It is also, for the moment, one of the few genuinely under-the-radar things happening inside Bonita Bay's gates.
If you are weighing what life inside Bonita Bay actually looks like day to day, beyond the golf courses and the marina everyone already talks about, Taylor Stewart tracks these kinds of details as part of knowing the community, not just the listings in it. Reach out anytime you want a longer conversation about what living here is really like.
