Coaching Clinic 7

Posted: 13.12.11 in Coaching Clinic Blog category

We have what seems an obvious error that is worth checking out as it will help your darts fly straight-An MOT for your technique and the skill of counting.

Welcome to our darts coaching blog.

The past few weeks has been an exciting time for The Darts Performance Centre and more importantly our knowledge of dart players and the right technique is slowly increasing. We have been to Northern Ireland for the Open and we visited the young players at The Belfast Darts Academy run by Darts Performance Centre coach Pat McGuinness. 

We also visited Rileys in Wolverhampton and met an array of players with different “hurdles” to overcome to achieve what every dart player on the planet craves, consistency!

M.O.T.

To help your car run consistently you get it serviced, checked up and an MOT done once a year but do you do the same for your dart throw? On our website we challenged our players to check that they were consistently doing the right thing.

Far too many blame their darts or just a “bad day at the office” when it is most likely a combination of bad habits and then frustration that results in inconsistency on the oche.  We would urge all players to spend a short time each week or even month just giving themselves the once over. Even better, do it with a dart playing partner and then you can check them over too.  Most phones have a good quality video application so use that to really take a deep look at what you are doing. 

 A few pointers to get you started are to look at

• ·         Same position on the oche
• ·         Aiming the dart with your eye
• ·         Excessive movement on the release of the dart
• ·         Follow through

Children are the Future!

The Belfast Darts Academy was a revelation. We have mentioned before that we are learning as fast as, we hope anyway, the players that come to our video analysis sessions. Two things that we picked up from our travels will no doubt help our players in the future.

We discovered that one advantage of coaching young people is that generally they are smaller than adults! By this we mean we noticed Belfast Darts Performance Academy coach Pat patrolling the oche as his young stars threw their darts. Why? Because he had noticed that on occasions the players’ darts were at a slight angle, pointing away from the twenty bed. Imagine your dart is a gun, if the barrel of the gun is pointing left the bullet will go left, your darts are no different!

So up on some chairs we clambered at the Northern Ireland Open and sure enough some of the adult dart players were doing exactly the same thing- add that to the MOT checklist. 

Counting

How much do you value the skill, yes the skill of counting in darts? The answer should be it is “gold dust”, absolutely vital. Going the correct route can save you a dart or two and closing on a double without stopping, calculating or even asking the marker or referee where you are is a huge advantage for any player.

The young people at the Belfast Darts Academy are encouraged during games to call out the score they have hit, calculate the score they are on and then call that out too. What a brilliant way of teaching the brain to calculate their scores in a match play situation. 

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The Darts Performance Centre is a resource to assist dart players of all standards play better darts. The site is arranged as an on-line coaching manual. There is advice on technique, nerves, psychology, goal setting, practice games, an area to log your statistics and an interactive area where your darting questions are answered by two sports scientists, one with 30 years dart playing experience! Membership is just £25.00 per annum.