Bringing New Players to Darts
by Frederick Everson

Generating and maintaining a high level of interest in darts in your local pub is essential if you want the owner to keep dartboards and scoreboards fresh and functional. For some entry-level players the learning curve is long, and if the league format is geared to pad the better players’ statistics, some of the beginning darters will get discouraged and drop out before they ever reach their best potential.

That’s one good reason to finish league competition with a team game – usually four or five players involved in 1001, or some other extended game. The team game gives the learning player a chance to pitch his darts in a joint effort. If he doesn’t play as well as the rest of the members on the team, he won’t stand out as much. Yet if he does play well, his teammates are apt to make a fuss and offer encouragement. A league that relies on lots of singles play is catering to the desires of better players, who seek to inflate their statistics and their egos. And there is nothing wrong with that, because that’s the nature of any competition. This is fine if you have a big base of good players, but if you are looking to increase the size of your league and the number of teams, it might be more productive to offer more team games with multiple players – a much friendlier format for players new to the game.

There are several ways to go about this besides having one grand team finale at the end of the night. A few 3-man games of 701 might be a good idea. Mandate that every team in the league be mixed, having at least one player of the opposite sex. This is a good way to make teams search for new blood.

Another way to generate interest and bring more new players into the game is to run a tournament specifically geared to less skilled players and newbies. One way to do this would be to have newbies pick veteran partners from a hat for a three-man team game. Make the tournament fun. Collect an entry fee and donate it to a charity, or buy something for the pub to enhance play or make it more comfortable. Don’t worry too much about awards – small trophies or even computer-designed certificates should do. The idea is to get new players throwing with skilled darters so they can learn the ins and outs of steel tipped competition without having to rely so much on their own scores. Darts is a fun game in any form, but it is also apt to be very competitive. If we would grow the game to a larger field of participants, it pays to make learning as easy as possible, and as much fun as possible.

To make this work, the better players need to help the novices learn the game. Competition doesn’t mean much if it restricted to a small number of skilled players beating on novices. The more the merrier certainly applies here.