WICKET WEEKEND: When the national croquet championship...

WICKET WEEKEND: When the national croquet championship comes to Sherwood Country Club in Thousand Oaks this weekend, there will be no absence of mallets. One of the entrants will be Rhys Thomas, who runs the croquet program at Sherwood and is ranked ninth nationally. . . . Thomas estimates that although hundreds of thousands of people play the sport in their back yards, only 4,000 to 6,000 play advanced tournament croquet. . . .The public is welcome to the event, which kicks off Sunday and ends Sept. 23.

FAIR-WEATHER FARMS: Unlike in the Midwest, where farmers are winding up their harvests before winding down for the winter, Ventura County growers stay on a more even keel (B1). . . . “This is the time of the year when everybody’s going crazy back East to get everything out of the ground before it freezes,” says Rex Laird of the Ventura County Farm Bureau. “But here, celery is in and the winter veggies are in. We’ve got everything that goes into a salad.”

TEEN SPIRIT: When Sonya Wang was in the third grade, her mom took her to the Miss Camarillo contest. Wang, now 19 and a sophomore at Stanford, thought at the time that it looked like fun, and now she knows she was right. . . . She became Miss Camarillo at 15, Miss California State at 16, Miss Teen of California at 18 and last month was named Miss Teen of America in San Diego. “I had so much fun,” she says. “People were just cheering me on--’Yeah, a home-state girl.’ ” . . . The latest contest carries a $10,000 scholarship, which Wang will use as she pursues East Asian and premed studies.

CYBERSCHOOLS: More and more, teachers around the county are tapping into subjects available through the Internet, the global computer network (B1). . . . Lani Martin, a consultant with the state Department of Education, thinks it’s a positive trend. “I’ve been a teacher for 20 years, and some of these things you can’t wait to get into your classroom.”