The Darts Experiment - 5
Night Three - The Preview
The 90 percent solution! Jamie, the sports psychology lecturer is meeting Team Kasbah this week. This is going to be interesting!
The 90 percent Solution
After last week's arrival of The Darts Performance Centre "mob handed" with four of us in attendance, The Darts Experiment continues this week on Tuesday with just one guest, but it is a guest that I think that most dart players would love to meet: Jamie, the Sports Psychology lecturer!We are often told by the pundits (and sometimes the players) that darts is 90 percent in the head - or is it 90 percent of dart players believe that 90 percent of it is in the head! Whatever it is, dart players, like a lot of sportsmen for that matter, see sports psychology as the holy grail, the missing link between being a champion and an also ran. On many occasions they are right!
What about grass roots players? What about Team Kasbah, a pub team, just like tens of thousands of pub teams over the world, what can they hope to benefit from having a real live expert in sports psychology to quiz, to listen to and to learn from? Well you will have to read the blog and listen to their feedback videos later on in the week and they can tell you themselves!
However, they are all looking forward to it. We have, just like darts tens of thousands of teams all over the world, a splendid array of dart player`s woes in Team Kasbah. We have a player (or two) lacking in confidence, one who believes he needs to get punchy to succeed, a player who has three different throwing techniques which he switches from depending on the outcome of the technique he was using for any one particular throw. We have inconsistency and negative self talk. As I said, a splendid collection and no different to every darts team in the world!
We also have a group of players who are also not always doing the fundamentals (just like tens of thousands of teams), these fundamentals are techniques that the champions use, they can, however, be mimicked by any dart player of any standard. Team Kasbah were asked to complete a sports psychology quiz Jamie wrote for us months ago when the Darts Performance Centre was being created. We ask all our new members to fill it in and we sent them a report suggesting areas of the site that they should visit to fill in the gaps in their knowledge. Team Kasbah filled in the quiz and there are gaps in their knowledge, these gaps will be filled tomorrow.
Team Kasbah will be discussing goal setting, relaxation, visualisation, their pre-throw routine and positive self-talk tomorrow night (all areas Jamie has written about on the Darts Performance Centre website). Although we have a colourful array of "areas to work on" these fundamentals will deal with all of them in some way or another. Team Kasbah will be shown how putting the basics in place can help set aside or deal directly with a whole host of areas that are detrimental to optimum performance.
I am sure 90 percent of them at least will really enjoy it!