Well, I suspect you can guess what I am going to talk about before even reading a word!  
yes that's right, I have done a little re-decorating of the site. I hope the changes will make it a little easier to get around here, and make the site a little more pleasant to deal with/look at. 

As you know I had come very close to simply letting the site expire, but decided that push comes to shove I enjoy it and while it is an expense, I do seem to have some readers and so maybe not the worst purchase in the world to extend the domain. I can decide again in a year! 

Now as for the darts, well summer season starts soon for me, and interesting timing as I am coming off a very frustrating patch to being back on form again.
Oh and you are almost out of time to enter the CONTEST (May 31st deadline! No exceptions!) 

Sorry for such small posts, but redoing the site with my lack of site redoing skills takes up a lot of time! Bigger and better posts ahead! 

Please let me know what you think of the redesign!! 

As always, thank you for reading!  

Dave 'The Abominable Throw Man' Sproull 

Well time has almost run out on this blog, and I have decided in this midnight hour to not only renew it but to give it a little bit of a face lift. Nothing dramatic, as if you hadn't noticed thus far, but I am no web designer. That being said, what creative powers I have are hard at work and soon I should have a remodeled site that will be a lot nicer and still have regular installments of my rambling about darts while also I hope providing better access to articles and resources to help your own dart game. 
I hope you like the changes when they come! 

Last thing, in this very short posting.. if you wanted a chance to win a set of Target Storm darts (or similar priced darts) there is still a little time to enter the contest.  

As it is nearing the deadline the activity has picked up a little but I will tell you that the chances of winning a set of darts is quite good!!  May 31st is the deadline!  


Thanks for reading. Sorry this is a short one, but I work to do behind the scenes here! 


-Dave 'The Abominable Throw Man' Sproull 

I am a little behind on writing these and so my mind is a little bit of a jumble as to exactly what I want to write about, and if I write about everything, what bits do I put where?
As a result I fear you might have to bear with me as this may all come very haphazard or worse yet as some stream of consciousness rambling. 
Well as you may have gotten a hint from the caption of the poor weathered dart board pictured above, the wife and I actually managed to get away for a few days for a holiday in a small city called Guelph (which is also where I lived for a while a good 15 years ago or so). It was good to see Guelph, as I realize that I am a happier man in a place where I can see the sky.  
It is also the first place I have thrown a dart that wasn't Toronto, and combined with the fact that we opted to stay in a hotel rather than when friends made it feel like quite the darting experience indeed!
Sadly we didn't get into any games with the locals, it would have been fun, and I was shooting fairly well. A lot better than I had been not so long ago at all.  
Somewhere, somehow out of the blue my game as young and nascent as it is went from going really quite well to simply falling apart.  It wasn't that I was shooting and missing, (which I was) but that I felt lost, distressed, anxious, that I didn't know what to do, how to shoot a dart!  
It was an unpleasant and frustrating experience, and one I am glad to put behind me.
The how of how I put it toward me is largely a re-commitment of my focus on proper practice with Flight School drills, and perhaps a hint of mumbo jumbo...
I started looking to see what I could find in the realm of sports psychology that might have helped me out or at least given me some perspective.  I found some interesting things, but a lot of it I had already heard before.
(stay in the now, focus on the process not the out come and so on).  
Then there was a YouTube video of a woman giving a lecture at a University (I can recall neither her or the university) and she spoke about what she called 'cutting edge' stuff called 'energy psychology'.  My curiosity piqued I looked it up and found something called 'Emotional Freedom Technique'. OK, I thought, sounds a bit new age but lets look it up.  It seems to have it's supporters but after a little research I find a lot of examples of it being debunked as legitimate therapy.  It looks like I have found myself some bonafide, if perhaps sincere quackery!
What do i do then?  Well try it out of course! 
Here is the thing, it actually seems to have worked.  Oh, there are claims it will let you re-grow arms and walk on water, and well that is a load of bunk, but as far as freeing me from my yip like tendencies gosh darn it, it kinda worked. 
Now I suspect it may work by a mechanism other than the official explanation, but I am not ruling anything out. It may be as simple as a placebo effect, but if that is the case then maybe placebos may be due a little more credit than they seem to get!  
Have any of you tried anything like this for darts? Maybe hypnosis?  Let me know!

There is still a very excellent chance to win and only a very short time to enter the contest I am running to help bring my wife's music to new people (she is also a dart player).
Truth be told I'll likely take a bit of a loss on this contest, but worth it to bring in new fans, and every download sold is very much appreciated, and we both hope that the chance to win a set of darts make sit an even more enjoyable purchase!
Check out the details of the CONTEST which closes May 31st

Good luck to all who enter and remember an alternate set to the Target's are possible if they're in the same price range! 

Well the renewal for the website comes due in a few weeks and I am hemming and hawing about whether I want to sink the money into renewing it again.  Is it more pleasure or chore?  Does it even serve a purpose of have a voice, in darts if not in the great ocean that is the interweb?
It would help if you had all clicked on the ads when i had them, or all made donations to the site, but I cant say that I really have (well except on rare occasion) so I can't take umbrage if you choose not to do so for me.
Thus, the question remains is it worth keeping alive on it's own merits, or do I let it die and maybe spend the cash on dart flights and  stems and fun stuff? 
What do you all think?

See you all next time!  Thank you as always for reading!  

Dave 'The Abominable Throw Man' Sproull.  

So now here we are in limbo for darts in Toronto where there is a gap of no darts between the end of the regular season of darts and the start of the summer season.  It is a break from darts that I am of course filling up with playing darts. Of course,  I really doubt you would expect any less of me?
I ended the regular season in  terms of my personal play winning games and on a high note, however as I think is familiar territory amongst dart players all the inefficiencies and inconsistencies and inadequacies of my game both mental and physical gnaw at me.  It isn't that I feel that I am a hopeless case, and it isn't that I have lost sight of just how new I am to this game.  It is the sense of 'far away and yet so close' that I suspect comes from going from being one of the littlest fish in your own little pond to realizing that even the bigger fish in your pond aren't all that big compared to the fish out there in the dart ocean.  
If one is at the bottom of the mountain and thinking about how far, and tiring a dangerous climb it is to the top it would be well within the realms of human nature to not only find this discouraging, but to also wonder if it is in your ability to complete that task. Then you might wonder if there is an escalator up the mountain? A helicopter? Some sort of short cut, some trick to shorten the distance?
if you also add to my allegory that most people who attempt to climb dart mountain. ( and yes I know a mere paragraph ago we were all fish) don't ever reach the top.  usually not even close. 
The first question this begs is 'do I even have a chance'?  What is think the answer to that is might surprise you, which is 'who cares' but to explain that I must explain the rest of my views on the subject.

You see, as a beginner I don't actually know the upper limits of my innate coordination and concentration other than it is some distance ahead of where I am now.   So whether it is even possible to get up the mountain is an unanswerable question until the time is put in, and for darts that time is years and decades. 
The view to the top is a long one.  This is somethingGeorge Silberzahn touches on in his Flight School course and it is a lesson that I think is worth keying into.  There is no escalator to the top of the mountain.  It is a very long hard climb and as mentioned a climb you likely wont complete. Why then do I say the question of getting to the top is irrelevant?  Well simply because it is not knowable until you have put in the time, and because it is the wrong goal.  A person who stands at the bottom of the mountain and stares way way way way up to the top I suspect will remain at the bottom staring way way way up to the top.  There are maybe some though who simply climb because they are climbers, and instead of looking to the top are looking to the next hand hold. Instead of to the top they are simply working on getting 'higher' with 'higher' being a slow process.

What that means in terms of darts is that dart players will play darts and if you are a dart player play darts and if you are a dart player who wants to become a better dart player, practice.  That's it. Enjoy the game and practice. That is all you can do and you cant predict how far you will go. (or to be positive, there is nothing to say you cant go far).  As George Silberzahn says "Don't make it happen, let it happen" .

I am also reminded of a recent internet meme with a quote from basketball deity Micheal Jordan that I think any of us at the bottom of dart mountain might want to take to heart.  

I think this is very good advice.  See you all on the oche!  I think exciting times are ahead in the upcoming summer league and beyond.  I plan on failing a lot and maybe learning even more.

If you are looking to find some direction in your own darts learning please give Flight School a look.  

Thanks for reading! 

As you may well have noticed I had been running a few small Google ads on various parts of the sight.  It wasn't a lot, but what little that was there still detracted from the sight and simply was not worth having. 
So I have removed them. I'll still plug support and flog anything I think is worthy of it in each individual blog, but there will no longer be any of the Google style ads. 

I don't do this page to make money and it isn't all that expensive to run anyway.  That being said it isn't free so if a dollar or two found it's way to me here and there it would be greatly appreciated.  If you like what I do and can spare it, well awesome. If not, well I'll likely be here anyway.

Either way..there is now a 'donate' button...

What I think would suit the page best of all is if I had some sort of official sponsor, but until that happens I am hoping the option to donate is a better route (both  for me and for all of you) than having the adverts. 

Please, all of you let me know your feelings on this!