Dartitis is a psychological condition affecting darts players. Illustration / Richard Dale
The basic skill of darts can look deceptively easy: Competitors pick up a dart and throw it at the board.
But imagine standing at the oche, getting into your stance, attempting to throw ... and then you freeze up.
Imagine being a darts player who can’t throw the dart.
There is a term for it: dartitis. Yes, it is a word, recognised by the Oxford English Dictionary.
Dartitis is a psychological condition affecting darts players where they experience a sudden and unexpected inability to release a dart – usually the first.
The most notable case of happened during a match at the 2017 Grand Slam of Darts when world youth champion Berry van Peer was reduced to tears in his clash with Gary Anderson.
The condition is related to similar issues in other sports, such as the yips in golf.
Senior lecturer in sport, exercise and performance psychology at Auckland University Dr Arne Nieuwenhuys says it can be down to simply someone putting too much pressure on themselves internally.
“As a consequence of pressure-filled performance moments, there are these things emerging in how we go about the movement execution that cause us to choke and be unable to perform the movement as fluently as we normally can under practice conditions or before the emerging of the condition.
“We start to internalise where, normally over years of experience, we become pretty automatic in how we execute these kinds of movements, suddenly we start to scrutinise and control the movement more in a step-by-step fashion to prevent things from going wrong.
“As soon as we do that, we start paying attention to things that we normally don’t pay attention to. We introduce the opportunity for error and the movement becomes more rigid – and the quality of execution goes down and people require longer to complete movements.
“I can imagine that in extreme cases going about a movement like that in a step-by-step fashion and being very much aware and conscious about each and every step of execution, that this can lead to a point where you halt movement and inhibit movement altogether as you transition from one sort of step to the next in your execution.”
Matthew Burns and Tracey Keegan are two New Zealand players who have experienced dartitis and have overcome it using different methods.
Burns says his problems began when he started putting more emphasis on his technique, in a bid to achieve the perfect throw. While his game initially improved, it didn’t take long for problems to present themselves.
He would have a minor pause before his throw, which later elongated. The problems came to a head during a trial to represent the Canterbury team.
“My arm locked up, and I couldn’t throw it,” he recalls. “It was like every time I would try throw the dart, I would fall over.
“It got to the point where my brain just said ‘no’, and it just melted in front of 50 people.”
Initially, Burns stopped throwing darts, and reverted to throwing ping-pong balls at his board, without any issues. Two months later, he decided to pick up his darts again, but it didn’t take long for the dartitis to return.
He then started hypnotherapy, and like before, it worked initially, but the same problems persisted.
“For me it’s not caring about it. You have to trick your brain into not caring.
“If you don’t care about the result it doesn’t matter. You just chuck it, if it goes in, it goes in and if it doesn’t it doesn’t. It seems to have worked for me.”
The story is different for Keegan.
She started playing darts in 1998 and then suddenly struggled to release the dart. Her confidence was affected.
“It played a lot on me mentally as well because I started to take the enjoyment away from darts,” she said.
“One night, I got home and just put my darts away and didn’t pick them up for three years.”
At the time, with no access to sports psychology, Keegan could only seek advice from those closest to her.
Eventually, after moving cities, she wanted to get back into darts, so she visited the local club and managed to throw without many issues.
But still, years without any darts were challenging.
“I think because I’d moved towns, and I thought ‘well, the only way that I’m going to get out to meet people was back into my darts’.
“I love my darts and it was frustrating when it got to the point that, I couldn’t play.
“It got to the point to where the darts were on TV and friends of mine were talking to me about it and I couldn’t watch because I really wanted to play.
“I wouldn’t go down to any of the venues where all my friends were, but that was a motivation to get back into it. I had to get out and do something and I was very happy when I was up to throw again.”
Both Kiwis say that having experienced dartitis, they can notice the signs if somebody else might develop it.
The latest top player to be struggling with it is world No 8 Nathan Aspinall.
“The Asp” is one of the sport’s most-loved professionals, thanks to his Mr Brightside walk-on and his passionate, fighting display on the oche.
The 33-year-old first noticed something was wrong in 2023 and it got to the point where he considered giving up the sport due to the mental toll.
What didn’t help was that Aspinall had issues with his elbow on his throwing arm, which involved having multiple injections and shockwave therapy.
And while Aspinall still struggles with it on stage, he’s managed to contain it for the most part, largely thanks to seeing a sports psychologist and taking part in hypnotherapy.
“Instead of feeling sorry for myself, I’m owning it, and it doesn’t look pretty at times, but I found a technique to deal with it, and it’s working for me,” he said after winning the Premier League night in Manchester earlier this month.
“I could give up now and say it’s defeated me, but dartitis won’t defeat me.
“I’m battling, I’m playing my heart out, I’m giving everything to this game and I’ve found a way to deal with it.
“The amount of messages I get from people about dartitis and the mental side of the game is unreal.”
Nieuwenhuys says another technique that can be used is to try to trick the brain by secondary tasks that they need to perform while throwing a dart.
“Initially distracting yourself in what is a forced way, trying not to pay attention to the movement.
“As the secondary task is more demanding, people will be less able to spend a lot of attention on the actual skill performance per se, so prevent that deliberate, processing of movement-related information.
“Then slowly ... you’d need to introduce in the practice more representative distractors that are present during actual competition, which could include others, or other people attending performance if that is a typical thing that people become aware of and which in the first place introduces this sort of self-consciousness.”
He says similar issues are quite common in sports like golf, basketball and gymnastics and feels increasing pressures in modern sport could lead to more people suffering from similar side effects.
“With expectations in sports increasing and the demands that we place on our athletes increasing like more generally speaking,” said Nieuwenhuys.
“I think that every major tournament – even if it is the Olympic Games – you see people being more open, speaking out about the pressures that they’re under.
“I think it’s always been there, and yes, we are doing more research and gaining a better understanding, and that would certainly lead to a different perspective and hearing more about it.”
Ben Francis is an Auckland-based reporter for the New Zealand Herald who covers breaking sports news.
He qualified for five events at the World Aquatics Junior Championships in Romania.