Ned Skinner

The recent conversion of his tennis court to croquet at their beautiful lakeside home overlooking Seattle barely scratches the surface of Ned Skinner's commitment to the sport of Croquet. This dynamic, but gentle man and his lovely wife Kayla would frequently bend their active travel and business schedule to enable them to attend the distant tournament in Arizona, croquet school in Palm Beach or Croquet Ball in New York.

His most visible contribution to the sport, however, will be the conversion of a section of the Seattle Seahawk practice fields into ten outstanding croquet courts which served as the home base of the Puget Sound Croquet Club and host site of the USCA Western Regional Championships on two occasions. Although the courts (and football practice fields) have now given way to a lakeside residential development, they, like Ned, will live forever in the memory of his croquet friends.

David E. (Ned) Skinner passed away August 5 in Seattle, Washington after an unsuccessful battle with cancer. Let the record show that this defeat was a rare one for a man who not only won the hearts and admiration of all of us in the croquet world as the prime mover behind the growth and success of the Puget Sound Croquet Club, but also as a winner of countless matches and friends on USCA courts from coast to coast.

As Chairman of the Skinner Corporation, co-owner of the Seattle Seahawks and a director of numerous Blue Chip corporations such as PepsiCo, Boeing and Westin Hotels, Ned's business skills were widely recognized. That he also had served as the First Vice President of the USCA and as a director of the Croquet Foundation of America until his untimely death will long be remembered by those of us with whom he shared the early growing pains of these organizations.

The obituary quoted above (from the 1988 USCA Summer Bulletin) and the tribute from the Seattle press signal Ned's passing and underscore our now lost hope that he would have been with us to accept his well earned induction into the U.S. Croquet Hall of Fame.

Ned Skinner was inducted into the United States Croquet Hall of Fame in 1988.