People often ask me about starting and promoting a darts league. How did we do it in the beginning, in Houston?
Well, it was a group effort, involving a lot of dedicated people. Quite a few of y’all are here in this forum.
When I got into darts in 1974, there was already a small group of darts players in Houston. About a couple-dozen darters met for very informal league play at three local bars. Zithers, High Noon located in the Heights & the upstairs White House Pub on South Main.
I joined the group and immediately decided to add Darts to my line of products at the kite & hang gliding shop I’d just opened.
Well, then I had a darts shop & needed to promote & needed both customers & places for them to play darts. So for years (still single then!) I spent nearly every evening visiting bars and talking bar owners into trying darts as a way to bring in new traffic. Back then, I’d either loan the dartboards & darts, or promise a refund if the bar did not get more traffic.
Then, working very closely with the fledgling HADA (HDA), we made sure that league darters visited the bar often, and scheduled teams, small tournaments, and league meetings at the new venues.
Promising officer & captain meetings was an easy & popular way to introduce darters to a new venue, as well as impress bar owners with the business potential of darts. In later years a Pub Laison Officer was assigned to stay in-touch with bars & keep them involved in HDA activities.
Recruiting new darters was simple, although time consuming.. visit a bar with dartboards, walk up to every person in the bar and ask them if they played darts. Then offer to show them how to play, drag them over to the dartboards, and give a quick lesson & pep talk about joining the HDA. “And BTW, here is a membership application, for $10 we can sign you up right now!” Repeat a few thousand times.
HDA officers and volunteers followed up, sending out membership cards & newsletters, then calling new members to recruit them onto teams.
At Rick’s Darts & Games, every set of darts sold came with a pitch to join the HDA. We signed up new members on the spot, giving them a merchandise discount that usually offset their $5 to $10 membership fee.
By the mid 1980s, the sport of darts was booming, our league was up to a thousand members, and there were many darts enthusiasts to “spread the word”, volunteer as league officers, recruit members and run events. As the league and my business grew, our own efforts gradually changed from daily recruiting in bars to supporting the activities of the HDA Board.
While I’d like to think that our own efforts through our darts shop helped in the very beginning, I certainly acknowledge that building Darts in Houston was a group effort involving an enormous amount of work by many, many dedicated volunteers.
Thanks to all who worked to help build the HADA/HDA/HCDA/SCDA over the last 50 years!
NOTE: Although this article is focused on the early days of steel-point darts in Houston, soft-tip darts has also had enormous growth here, especially after the widespread adoption in the early 1980s. Soft-tip darts league development, however, has been driven more by commercial vendors and bar owners. Steel-point darts, in general, been usually been promoted on more of a volunteer basis.
