Over the last few years the Petersfield Darts League has slowly been dropping in teams entering the league and as a consequence the number of players has begun to dwindle to. So when I took over as League Chairman about 3 years ago now we as a new committee decided that we needed to do several things to increase the games population again within the town.
First off was to bring the league forward and into the 21st Century and we did this by creating the leagues web site, this was something that we felt we needed to do to move with the times, this was met with the usual criticism of ‘why can’t we just stay with what were doing’, but in general and over time this has been used and we currently stand at just under 35,000 hits within 3 years. We also felt that we needed to offer more competitions within the league so that everyone no matter what the ability had a chance to compete with people of a similar standard, and this has proved a great success and it is nice to see different people every year win something.
Thirdly I identified a need to encourage the youngsters of the town to take up darts so that the league would continue for many years. There were a few youngsters playing but that was mainly due to the fact there mum or dad did as well. So it was my intention to set up some sort of youth academy to encourage more youngsters to play darts.
After many discussions I was pointed in the direction of the very successful Andover Youth Academy. By this point the project was being organised by me and I made contact with Glen Dawkins and the discussions of setting up our academy had begun. It was my intention to have the academy set up by the time the league’s agm came around in June this year so that I could step down as chairman having achieved everything I had set out to do. But as the saying goes work has to come first and this meant that progress was slow and I continued as league chairman for another year.
In July this year having set out my plan at the agm we held our first academy meeting to appoint the committee as we would have a busy six months before my planned launch date in January 09. The committee was elected and everyone was given there task. We made a visit to the Andover Academy so that the new committee could see what we were trying to achieve, and I think the size of the task hit everyone.
So where are we now, well one of the first things I wanted to achieve was to get the backing of someone from within the game, and a chance meeting with Mr Lowy from Unicorn Darts back in May when I visited the Andover Academy was the first success and after a meeting with Unicorn in September we are now linked with Unicorn darts for which I am most grateful. Through Unicorn’s connections with some of the world’s top players James Wade is now our Academy’s Honorary President. We have also approached the local councils and housing association for there backing, and also Hampshire police all of whom we are waiting to hear from.
So on Monday December 1st 2008 we will be holding our Academy’s open evening before our big Launch in January 09. So if you are in the area and interested in darts then please come along. Full details can be found on our website.