What You Need To Safely Throw A Dart Competition For Your Gradeschool Kids And Their Friends
If you're a big dart player, and your kids and their friends have seen you playing darts and have been bugging you to let them play, then you are probably faced with a bit of a dilemma. You don't want to let very young kids start tossing around darts because it can be dangerous. However, you also don't want to make it so taboo that they will become obsessed with it and try and sneak a game in when you're not looking. So, what you should do is safely introduce your kids and their friends to darts by organizing a safe dart competition.
Don't Use Your Regular Darts and Dart Board
The first thing you should do is get a new dart board and dart set. You don't want a bunch of little kids (who are going to be excited playing darts) to have real, sharp steel darts. So, what you should do is pickup a plastic dartboard set. These are designed to be used with plastic tipped darts. Unlike traditional dart boards where the steel tipped darts plunge into the cork, these have tiny little holes that the plastic tipped darts will stick into. Some of them are more advanced than others (there are electronic dart boards that will keep score) but a simple, plastic set is good enough to get the kids introduced to the game.
A White Board To Keep Score
You will want to create teams and keep score. That way the kids will all get a turn to play and it will be a fun, group activity. You can divide up the teams on the whiteboard and then play a game like cricket, hare and hounds, or around the world. If you already have a chalkboard, you can use that to keep score. But if you're going to be getting a new one for this event, a white board is nice since you can used cool, different colored dry erase markers.
Customized Ribbons For Prizes
A cool way to make the tournament fun is to get a bunch of personalized, custom ribbons. You can get one color for the winner, and a second color for the runner up. The nice thing about using custom ribbons is that each kid can receive one, unlike a big trophy where they might fight over it. Also, if the kids really like the dart tournament, you can set up a recurring tournament for your kids and their friends. In that case, you can get a whole lot of ribbons, which is definitely much cheaper than getting big bulky trophies.
You could even set up a multi-tournament system, culminating with a big end of season tournament (like with NCAA) and get special large custom ribbons for that tournament.
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