By Shane McAdams

Last year during the 2017-2018 school year, one of the only intramural sports that remained operational on the QU campus was darts. However, even intramural darts suffered a drop in participation from students as the school year dragged on.

On top of teams that signed up being low last year, there were many times when teams would simply not show up to compete. In an interview last year, the student director of intramural activities Charlie Grimsley worried about the future of darts.

“It’s pretty hard to have intramural sports when nobody signs up, and teams that do sign up don’t show up either. if students don’t show more interest in intramural’s we might just not have them next year,” Grimsley said.

However, this year student engagement has gone in a different direction. This year, student engagement has had many more events on campus to keep things fresh each week. Activities such as movies nights on campus, pumpkin painting, ice cream socials, dodgeball, and many more.

While these activities have done a great job engaging students; there hasn’t been a real intramural sport on campus this year, until now. October 25th marked the return of intramural darts in the 2018-2019 school year.

The turn out for darts was strong, with more than twenty 20 teams all gathering to battle it out in the Hawk’s Nest below the cafeteria for the title of champion of the week. However, some problems arose with actually having a full bracket of teams for darts.

One problem that became abundantly clear to participants was how long it was going to take. With more than 20 teams, playing in a double elimination tournament, with a losers bracket, and only four boards to play on, the tournament ran almost until midnight.

Another problem that became obvious once the tournament started was the lack of darts for the teams. At the onset of the tournament there was barely enough workable darts for each board to have one set of three darts. each two person team would share these darts during the game. This isn’t a big deal until darts start to break.

Sophomore Connor Martin is a previous darts champion.

“The darts are not very nice, the all plastic ones get the job done but the tips tend to break after a few games, and we don’t have any replacement tips for the darts. When I’m getting hot with a set of darts it really sucks when all of a sudden a tip breaks off,” Martin said.

Despite these difficulties with intramural darts, the turn out was still solid for the first week. Senior Collin Adams was the other member of the winning team from the first intramural darts tournament that took place on October 25th.

“I was really stoked that as many people came and showed up as they did, it just made winning that much better. It kinda felt like it took forever just to get to the final game because we had to wait for the losers bracket to finish up but it was still fun and playing intramural darts is kind of a tradition for me so I couldn’t miss it,” Adams said.

There are even more events happening on and around campus in the coming days like the halloween fundraiser for the Haiti connections club and midnight volleyball. For More Information on campus activities click here .