The Darts Experiment - Night 4 Feedback

Posted: 24.03.11 in Darts Experiment Blog category

Here is the feedback from The Darts Performance Centre and Team Kasbah on the coaching session we held recently as part of The Darts Experiment

The Darts Experiment – Night 4 – The Feedback - The Darts Performance Centre 

Once again Team Kasbah proved how adaptable and enthusiastic they are for The Darts Experiment project and we had a good night. The object from the Darts Performance Centre point of view was first of all to demonstrate to Team Kasbah that there are alternative ways to practise darts. Ways that can be a lot more beneficial at honing skills than the way most dart players practise as well as being interesting, motivational and fun! Did we succeed? There are two sides to every tale!

The Darts Performance Centre – Paul Gillings

Overall I feel the night went well. I made some mistakes, however! I introduced six new practice games, seven if you count the match at the end, because that was un-conventional too. I should have given the players the rules and score sheets the previous week to digest, but I am learning during this experiment too! Overall though the players were quick to grasp the rules and there were not too many delays.

The key issue for me and the biggest area that I need to reflect on is that dart players are not used to a “formal” coaching environment. Players in a “for fun” football, rugby or cricket team would generally speaking have experienced a coaching environment. This will be in varying degrees of standard and intent but nevertheless it is something that most players participating in one of these sports would be used to. This is not a slur on Team Kasbah or any darts team for that matter, it is just a fact. Darts teams do not have conventional coaching sessions, compared to most other sports, well not until last Tuesday anyway!

From the feedback I received from Team Kasbah there are two points I would like to bring to the fore. First of all it seems that in general dart players could benefit from looking at their practice set up if it is agreed that Team Kasbah represent a “typical” pub team. On the whole Team Kasbah enjoyed the session and it did appear that they would be prepared to practise for a more sustained period than they normally would have done using the games we introduced tonight. We also believe (partly from the results reported to us by our website members) our games are more effective practice than conventional practice games or leg after leg style of practice.

The second point is more for me to address as a coach or analyst; how to get the players to think “critically” about the principles behind the games? There were incidents where some games were disregarded by players because of their perceived lack of relevance to contributing to skills needed to win darts matches. Is this due to inadequate feedback from me explaining why? Or is it that dart players have never been challenged to dig beneath the principles of practice before? A combination of the two is probably the answer to that. On the other hand there was some excellent feedback from Team Kasbah on how the games could be adapted to make them even more relevant so perhaps I am expecting too much too soon?

What did Team Kasbah think of our practice session? Let them tell you themselves: 

For all website members we will put a PDF of the session plan we used last night including the rules, targets and points we allocated is on the site.

You can join the Darts Performance Centre for £25.00 per annum

Details of "The Practice Board" mentioned in the video can be found here