Philadelphia’s dart leagues are thriving, and ‘everybody knows your name’

Laughter fills the air in the back of Melrose’s Taproom on 19th, the soundtrack to the Bonnie Situation’s weekly gathering. Here, the winter’s chill and the day’s burdens are momentarily forgotten. As another comrade bustles through the doorway, an uproar echoes through the bar as if Norm Peterson just walked onto the set of Cheers, a beer sliding across the bar in welcome.

The only agenda for the dart shooters is notching a triple-20 into the dartboard before the next rounds of Miller and bourbon.

Across the city, in dimly lit dives, American Legion posts, and buzzing sports bars, hundreds of teams find their sanctuary on dart league nights. For the Bonnie Situation — a team of servers, bartenders, and a trucking logistics supervisor — winning tonight’s match is just a fraction of what brings them back week after week, for four-hour battles in the city’s Olde English Dart League.

“Shooting darts gives you camaraderie. It’s something to do every Tuesday,” said Anthony Santini, a founding member of the Bonnie Situation. “None of us are young and spry enough to play competitive organized sports anymore, but a lot of us were college athletes playing lacrosse, wrestling, basketball. We all have that competitive heart, and now we can shoot darts and drink a beer while we do it.”

These occupied dartboards across the city may seem like impromptu friend gatherings, but they represent over 2,000 players engaged in the city’s organized dart leagues.

The Quaker City English Dart League, one of the city’s oldest, marks its 50th anniversary this year, a significant leap from its modest beginnings in 1974 with a few teams, to boasting 1,400 players across more than a hundred teams in 2024. The Olde English Dart League, where the Bonnie Situation competes, is on the brink of reaching 1,000 participants, each aiming to top their division and ascend to the next level, where even tougher opponents await.

There’s no cash prize for winning either, they play for pure bragging rights. And maybe a T-shirt.

Philadelphia’s ties to darts extend beyond these leagues. While English darts dominate the sporting world, an American version of the sport is believed to have been developed in Eastern Pennsylvania, with Philadelphia home to one of the most popular manufacturers of American darts in the world, hundred-year-old Widdy Dart Board Manufacturing in Delco. English darts use metal or plastic shafts thrown into a fiber or cork dartboard, whereas American’s wooden shaft darts are thrown into wooden boards and use different scoring systems. American darts leans heavily into baseball verbiage for many aspects of the game.

The Bonnie Situation — whose name originates from the third chapter of the 1994 film Pulp Fiction — is coming off a division championship last fall as they hunker down on a Tuesday night at Taproom on 19th for a home game against the Artful Dodgers, who later handed the Bonnies a loss. The team has been shooting together for the last seven years.

Dozens of bars and clubs across the city, from Cavanaugh’s Rittenhouse to Holmesburg’s Oxley American Legion Post, serve as “home bar” to one or several teams. Every week, teams will either hit the road or enjoy home-field advantage at their local watering hole.

In the case of the Bonnies, when their former home bar Cavanaugh’s was getting crowded, teammates Bryan Padgett and Kyra Harris helped open the Taproom on 19th, where they both work, to the league.

Harris, a bartender by trade and assistant captain of the Bonnie Situation by night, hails from Ireland and was thrust into organized darts a decade ago by her patrons of then Dark Horse bar, now Cavanaugh’s. She later joined the Bonnie Situation and met her fiancé, and teammate, Padgett, on the team.

“On Monday nights, all the Division 1 top shooters would come in to practice, so I’d throw with them all the time. Soon they told me, ‘Show up to Dirty Franks, 8 p.m., this Tuesday, there’s a team — you’re on it,’” Harris remembers fondly. “It was one of the first teams that had three women on it when there weren’t a lot of women playing darts in the league.”

Tucked away on the opposite side of Philadelphia sits the city’s only brick-and-mortar business dedicated to darts, Bull’s Eye Darts in Tacony.

In a sport where passion and precision collide, owner Mark Whited serves as Philadelphia’s answer to Harry Potter’s wandmaker, Ollivander. With an extensive assortment of dart tips, shafts, barrels, and flights at his disposal, he meticulously crafts the perfect dart set for each enthusiast he serves. Over the years, Bull’s Eye Darts has outfitted everyone from Flyers players to the Cake Boss, drawing patrons from across the nation.

Whited, who’s been shooting darts since his childhood in the Northeast, created the city’s exclusive darts hub more than 20 years ago, in a storefront owned by his mother. He first built the Bull’s Eye brand in a Frankford storefront and later moved up to Tacony. Today, he operates the shop alongside his sons and, occasionally, his longtime friend and QCEDL teammate, Charlie McSwain.

“You can be wealthy and play darts or you could just be the average working-class Philadelphian, it’s a sport for everybody,” Whited said.

Whited and McSwain combined boast over four decades of league play, embodying the essence of darts not just as a sport, but as a conduit for lifelong friendships.

“A lot of these teams, six or seven guys on a team, have been shooting together for 10 years or even longer,” McSwain said.

As Santini from the Bonnie Situation will tell you, players “don’t necessarily leave darts leagues” unless major life events — marriage, children, or relocation — pull them away. Yet, the bonds formed over the dartboard endure.

Of course, there isn’t a sport without its competition — that’s the pulse of darts. Rivalries and personal contests arise, but disputes are never taken beyond the throw line. “If you have a disagreement, you settle it on the dartboard,” Whited said.

Dart leagues’ “come as you are” mentality opens the way for all walks of life, said the Bonnie Situation’s team captain and namesake, Bonnie Centrone.

“We start at 7:45 p.m. and we’ll end around midnight, so some people come earlier and some stay later. They put the kids to bed or they work till 8 p.m.,” Centrone said. “Darts is accommodating to what we like to call ‘day walkers’ and ‘night walkers.’”

As Brian “Paddy” Padgett and Harris will tell you, the league’s community comes in handy outside of the sport, too.

“We just got engaged last month and so far we have a caterer, multiple DJs, a florist, and then Kay Kay’s Cakes is across the street so she’s going to make our cake,” Harris said, pointing to various patrons of the bar.

At the end of a dart league night, hands are shaken, hugs are handed out like candy, and a last call for drinks sends teams back into daily life. But like Cheers, the weekly reunion is less about winning, more about the community that has your back.

Quaker City English Dart League plays multiple nights a week with leagues for all players: men, women, and youth. Join the league by contacting league administrators by email at PhillyQCEDL@gmail.com or call 267-225-7230. For help and up-to-date information on the league, join their Facebook group.

Olde English Dart League plays on Tuesday nights with more than 10 divisions and 50 teams to join. Join the league by contacting league administrators at yourleaguestats.com/darts/oedl. For help and up-to-date information on the league, join their Facebook group at facebook.com/OEDLdarts.