The Darts Factor is a TV series aiming to discover future stars of Darts, helping some of the young players to turn professional and sponsoring them on the PDC tour in 2016. All profits from the series plus final ticket sales & memorabilia auction) go to The Brain Tumour Charity and The Stop Smoking Scheme
Team Protege have been running X Factor style Darts competitions – from pub to professional – for four years. Each year, the finalists contest the final at the Alexandra Palace during the PDC World Championship for the Darts Protege title.
My background is in teaching students from difficult, challenging backgrounds and minority ethnic groups. Darts is an amazing sport for bringing people together and breaking down – often difficult to overcome – boundaries.
Darts is also wonderful for teaching numeracy and improves pupils’ arithmetic beyond belief. The fact is that if you play Darts, you become significantly better at arithmetic than previously.
During the series (and the past four years), we have visited many Darts academies around the country and the amount of times children tell us stories of “moving up in sets” or “becoming top of the class in Maths” since they started at their respective Darts Aacademy, are countless.
Since we formed four years ago, the academies have grown beyoind belief. The EKDA – East Kent Darts Academy has gone from 5 players to 42; Karl’s academy in The North West (St. Helens) has increased from being able to count the number on two hands at the beginning to 50 or 60 players of all ages, with players such as Chizzy (Dave Chisnall) and Bully (Michael Smith) milling around, the kids get to spend valuable time with their heroes… not in many (if any) other sports does this happen so freely. Davy-Jay (above) is from Jamie Caven’s inspirational academy in Derby that boasts facilities and characters second to none.
Davy-Jay Knowles, from this week’s show, who is 7 years of age and has already hit a 180 in competition and played Youth County Darts. Here’s Davy practising and auditioning in this week’s episode #DavyJay (7.20 into clip)
The girl in the main picture, Beau Greaves, does something pretty miraculous in next week’s episode: here’s Beau at home with the family
The Darts Factor brings together players from all countries of the Great British isles, boys and girls, aged 7-23 – quite the age range.
The etiquette, manners and general attitude of every single applicant is exemplary – as Brad Halls displays (after we see Kyle’s Ashes preparation) at the beginning of this week’s ‘Darts Factor’.
Our aim is to help to create icons that young people can aspire to be; icons they can empathise with and relate to, as they are of a similar age.
With sponsorship of Darts being very minimal, the ongoing project requires initial funding for it to remain televised and in order for Protege to continue to fund and sponsor so many young players and create professional players from the reality TV format. In the process of raising the capital, we can donate half of the series profits + final ticket sales (+memorabilia auction) to The Brain Tumour Charity, having been inspired by ‘Laser’ Liam Fairclough in this week’s episode, overcoming a brain tumour and blindness to become the laser he is today! Half will go to the Stop Smoking Scheme… if these youngsters play in the pubs/clubs, we want to keep them smoke free and help people to quit for good!
Plus, we are offering fantastic rewards for pledging. Rewards will be sent once the target is reached. If the target is not reached, your pledge is refunded.