How to Run a Darts Club

1. Get the basics right before you open the doors

Darts has the lowest barrier to entry of almost any sport going — a board, a set of darts, a wall and a tape measure and you're playing. The harder news is that "a few people throwing in the corner of a pub" and "a club" are different things, and the gap between them is what this guide is about.

Board and venue

Most UK darts clubs are based in a pub, working men's club, social club or community hall — somewhere with a bar, a regular night and a wall you can put a board on. The best thing you can do for retention is lock in a recurring slot: a fixed "Thursday from 8pm" does more than any amount of recruitment, because darts is a habit before it's a hobby. Talk to the landlord or steward early — most venues love a darts night because it fills the bar on a quiet weeknight, so you've more leverage than you think.

Hang the board properly. The bullseye sits 1.73m (5ft 8in) from the floor and the oche — the throwing line — is 2.37m (7ft 9¼in) back, measured along the floor from the face of the board (or 2.93m diagonally from the bull, the cleaner way to check it). Get this wrong and every score at your club is, technically, on a non-standard setup. Light it from both sides so the doubles don't sit in shadow, and put a proper mat down so nobody's arguing about the line.

Equipment

You need: a bristle board (sisal — never the cheap coiled-paper or magnetic boards, they don't take steel tips and don't last), a surround to save the wall, decent lighting, a scoreboard (a chalkboard at minimum), and a few sets of loan darts for newcomers and anyone who's left theirs at home. A couple of spare sets at the oche is the difference between a curious first-timer having a throw and going back to the bar. Keep spare flights and shafts in a tin — they snap constantly.

Open throw or structured?

Decide whether your night is open play (turn up, join the rotation, play whoever's next — social and beginner-friendly) or structured (a fixed singles ladder, a knockout, a team fixture against another pub). Most thriving clubs run open social throw on the main night to keep numbers up, then layer a ladder or league on top for those who want to keep score.

2. Build a member base that turns up

Darts has a huge, slightly hidden pool of potential members — the boom in the televised game has pulled in a whole generation who'd never call themselves "sporty", plus the steady core who've thrown in the same pub for thirty years. Your job is to give both a reason to show up to your night.

Where to recruit

• The venue itself. A poster behind the bar and a word from the landlord catches the regulars who already drink there and have always fancied a throw — your warmest, cheapest audience, so start here.
• Local Facebook groups. Town pages and "what's on in [town]" groups convert well for a weeknight social night. A photo of the board, "every Thursday 8pm, all welcome, darts provided", and you'll get replies the same evening.
• Existing pub and county leagues. Players who already throw in a Tuesday-night league often want a more relaxed second night, or a team for the off-season. Get onto the local league's noticeboard or group chat.
• Other clubs in the venue. Pool, dominoes, crib and quiz nights share your exact crowd. A flyer on the night before yours is a warm, low-effort lead.

Make joining painless

The fastest way to lose an interested newcomer is to make them email you, wait for a reply, and sign a paper sheet on a corkboard. The fastest way to convert them is a single link or QR code — stuck on the poster behind the bar — that adds them to the roster, shows the next night, and lets them pay subs if they want to commit. In ClubLono every club gets a join QR code and a public page (something like clublono.com/c/your-club): players scan it at the bar, enter their name, and they're in — no email chain, no sign-up sheet to type up later.

3. Decide how you'll collect money

Darts is cheap to run, so fees exist to cover the board, league entry, trophies and maybe a Christmas-do kitty — not to turn a profit. Three models are worth considering, and you can mix them.

Pay-per-night

Players drop £2–£3 in the tin each time. Pros: dead simple, fair on irregular throwers, no commitment to scare off a first-timer. Cons: someone's always short, and chasing coins is the most thankless job in club running.

Annual or monthly subs

A flat membership — typically a modest annual sub plus a small weekly board fee. Pros: predictable money for league fees and kit, less faffing with the tin. Cons: a barrier for someone who just wants one go.

Hybrid (recommended for most clubs)

A small annual sub for committed members plus a guest rate for one-offs. Best of both — the sub funds league entry and the new board, the guest rate keeps the door open for newcomers. The only complication is remembering who's paid, which is where software earns its keep.

What to charge

Work backwards from your real costs: a bristle board lasts a season or two, league entry and trophies are annual, and the venue rarely charges you if you're filling the bar. Add it up, divide by a realistic number of members (not your aspirational one), and round to something people can pay without thinking. Charging £3 instead of £2.50 saves a weekly argument with the tin, and nobody has ever quit a darts club over fifty pence.

4. Run a night that feels fair

This is where a darts club grows by word of mouth or quietly fizzles out. Players forgive a sticky floor and a flat pint. They don't forgive standing around chalking for an hour while the same two players hog the board, or being knocked out by a county thrower in their first ever game.

The queue

With one board and a room full of players, the rotation is the night. The traditional "winner stays on" or chalking your initials works, but it rewards whoever shouts loudest and leaves quieter newcomers waiting all evening. A digital queue fixes that: players tap to join from their phone, see their position, and get called when the board's free. Nobody can skip the line, and you're not refereeing it. ClubLono's queue is the core of every session, and the host can override anything — it's a tool, not a bouncer.

Matching players and the format

Fair matchmaking is the biggest factor in retention. A first-timer who gets whitewashed by a 100-average regular won't come back; a strong thrower stuck playing beginners all night gets bored and drifts elsewhere. ClubLono runs darts as stroke play — every player throws their own game and is scored on their own result, so a busy one-board night isn't bottlenecked waiting for head-to-head pairings and you can rank the whole field fairly. The built-in rating updates per game so groupings and the ladder stay sensible.

Scoring and rotation

Darts uses countdown scoring — the standard club game is 501, straight in, double out: both players start on 501, subtract each visit's score, and must finish on a double (or the bullseye) landing exactly on zero. Go below two or finish on the wrong number and the visit busts. Set the rules before the night — best of three or five legs, double in or straight in — because nothing derails a night like a "does the bull count as a double?" debate mid-leg (it does — the bull finishes as a 50, a double 25). ClubLono tracks the countdown and standings so you can throw instead of arguing over the chalk.

The newcomer brief

Keep a one-minute explainer for first-timers: three darts a visit, the treble ring scores three times the segment (treble 20 = 60, the most off one dart), you count down from 501, and you finish on a double. Don't drown them in checkout charts — three rules and a friendly opponent is enough to get someone hooked.

5. Keep people coming back

Retention is cheaper than recruitment — and a darts club's social glue is half the point, so this is where the real work is.

Communicate in one place

If the fixture lives in a WhatsApp group, the table on a printout behind the bar, and the away-match lift-sharing in someone's DMs, members miss things and the away team turns up short. Pick one channel. ClubLono includes a members-only club chat with photos and reactions — every player on the roster is automatically in it, and booked players get a thread for their night so a last-minute "board's broken, we're on the back wall" reaches the right people, not all 60 members.

Schedule nights ahead

"Same night every week" is the floor. Better is a published fixture showing the next 4–8 weeks — home and away, the bank-holiday weeks you're dark, the cup nights. ClubLono lets you publish a recurring calendar with capacity limits, and members get a push notification when a new night opens — no Facebook event, no out-of-date printout behind the bar.

Add a competitive layer

Once you've got regulars, a club singles ladder or a monthly knockout gives people something to climb and brag about — the difference between "a thing I sometimes do" and "my club". Keep the open social throw as the front door and let the ladder sit alongside it; each feeds the other.

6. Stay legal and safe

The dull but necessary section. Darts governance in the UK is genuinely fragmented — there isn't a single Sport England-style national governing body the way badminton has Badminton England, so don't assume a tidy "affiliate and you're covered" path.

Insurance

Public liability insurance is strongly recommended for any club running on someone else's premises — and most pubs and clubs already hold a policy covering organised activity, so your first call is the landlord or steward: ask what their cover includes and whether your night sits under it. If you store kit, run away fixtures or handle members' money, consider a standalone club policy through a sports-club insurer. Darts has no single Sport England-style governing body the way badminton has Badminton England; instead there are several bodies you can affiliate to depending on level — England Darts (a World Darts Federation member), the grassroots, county-focused United Kingdom Darts Association, your local county organisation, and at the professional end the PDC (a commercial promoter, not a grassroots NGB). Treat any cover that comes with affiliation as a floor, never a substitute for confirming the venue's policy.

Safeguarding

If you run sessions for under-18s — youth darts is growing fast off the televised game — you need a safeguarding lead, DBS-checked organisers and a written policy, plus the venue's agreement to under-18s on the premises (a real consideration in a pub). Use a recognised template rather than writing one from scratch.

Data protection (UK GDPR)

The moment you store members' names, emails or phone numbers you're a data controller. In practice: have a short, plain-English privacy notice, don't share personal data without consent, and let members delete their details on request. With ClubLono the data-protection plumbing is handled at the platform level and members can delete their own account.

Money handling

If you take more than a trivial amount in subs and league fees, open a separate bank account for the club. Running club money through your personal account — or letting it slosh around the bar tin all year — is the fastest route to a difficult AGM.

7. Grow without burning out

Most volunteer-run clubs don't collapse from a lack of members — they collapse because the one person doing the fixtures, subs and chalk gets tired and quits. The founder's real job is to remove themselves as the bottleneck.

• Spread the load. Train two or three deputies who can hang the board, run the rotation, take subs and lock up when you're away — and captain an away team so it's not always you in the car.
• Automate the boring stuff. Subs chasing, night reminders, the queue, refunds on a cancelled night — all of it can be a tool's job. If it lives only in your head or your tin, it falls over the moment you're away.
• Write things down. A one-page "how this club runs" doc — venue contact, payment login, where the spare flights live, the league secretary's number — protects everyone if you're suddenly unavailable.

8. The tools that actually save time

You can run a small darts club on a chalkboard, a WhatsApp group and a biscuit tin of coins. Plenty do. It works at 15 members, creaks at 40, and becomes a part-time unpaid job once you're fielding two teams and a ladder. Dedicated software collapses four tools into one and stops you being the bottleneck:

• The roster stops being a sign-up sheet behind the bar and becomes self-serve via a QR code.
• Subs stop being chased and start collecting automatically via Stripe, straight to your bank account.
• The queue stops being initials chalked on the board and becomes a phone list nobody can skip.
• Messages stop being scattered across WhatsApp and an out-of-date printout and live in one members-only chat.
• Nights become a published fixture with capacity limits and automatic refunds when you cancel.

ClubLono is £0/month for a single club, with no time limit and no feature cliff — roster, queue, stroke-play scoring, nights, chat, capacity and refunds all work on the free tier. On paid sessions, the host receives the payment less Stripe's 1.5% + 20p and a 5% ClubLono platform fee. The Premium tier (£19.99/month or £199.99/year, with a 14-day free trial on either) drops that platform fee to 1% and unlocks multi-club hosting, leagues, kiosk mode for a tablet at the oche, cross-club stats and DUPR export. The annual plan works out at roughly £16.67/month — about two months free versus monthly billing. Premium pays for itself once a club is doing roughly £500/month in paid sessions on monthly billing, and there's no point at which it costs more than free. It's built for exactly the club this guide describes: a regular group of darts players who'd rather be at the oche than buried in admin.