Rob Gillan and Patrick Morrison (both front) as part of the New Zealand para darts team.
Para darts may still be a relatively new sport in New Zealand, but its impact is already reaching well beyond the dartboard, opening up opportunities for people with disabilities.
In 2023, Dunedin’s Rob Gillan officially launched ParaDarts New Zealand, a milestone four years in the making after competing at the inaugural World Cup of Darts for players with disabilities in Belgium.
The tournament ultimately sparked the formation of World ParaDarts, the global governing body that now oversees the sport’s expansion and supports a community of more than 300 registered players from 25 countries.
For more than two decades, Gillan has lived as a T34 paraplegic after a forklift accident left him paralysed from the waist down. Yet he knew nothing about disabled darts until he purchased a new dartboard and spotted height guidelines tailored for wheelchair players.
That discovery has proved life‑changing for the 39‑year‑old, taking him from throwing darts in his garage to travelling the world, meeting like‑minded players, and securing a sponsorship deal with leading manufacturer Target.
“It’s gone from helping me with my depression to now doing it on a competitive sporting platform,” Gillian said.
“It’s something that I value quite highly being that darts can mean a lot of different things for a lot of people. It’s given me a distraction from things that were troubling me in life.”
Para darts caters for both wheelchair and standing players, and to participate you must pass certain criteria and receive approval from the governing body.
The standing category includes people with amputations, prosthetic limbs, spina bifida and other conditions that affect mobility.
The sport also adapts the playing environment to create fairness. Dartboards are lowered for wheelchair competitors to ensure the same throwing angle as standing players.
“It just creates an even playing field,” Gillan said. “You’re throwing at the board, not up at the board.”
Another man whose life has been changed by the para sport is fellow Dunedin-based player Patrick Morrison, who had barely thrown darts before a motorcycle crash on March 20, 2016.
“I had thrown darts probably half a dozen times during my life before my accident and it certainly wasn’t the sport for me,” Morrison said.
Morrison’s crash left him as a T4 paraplegic and he initially tried to play wheelchair rugby, but didn’t fit the criteria, so he turned to the gym and swimming.
It wasn’t until he came across a Facebook post nearly three years later from Gillan seeking people with disabilities keen to try darts that Morrison became intrigued – and he hasn’t looked back since, competing in his first overseas tournament in 2022, while also being sponsored by New Zealand manufacturer, Shot.
“It’s given me the opportunity to travel to Europe and the UK, which are things that I never thought I would probably do once I was in a wheelchair,” Morrison said.
But like Gillan, it has also helped Morrison mentally, who lives with constant neuropathic pain caused by his spinal injury – a sensation he describes as feeling like “a big rubber band squeezing around the torso”.
“It’s something that’s been good for mental health and for taking my mind off other issues that I quite often have,” Morrison said.
“Being able to throw darts most afternoons after work, it takes your mind off it and lets me focus on that rather than focusing on the pain, which is a nice distraction.”
Morrison and Gillan have now established themselves as New Zealand’s top wheelchair players.
There are currently 15 registered players in New Zealand, which Gillan describes as a huge achievement, although the goal is to continually get bigger and better.
As para darts continues to grow in New Zealand, Gillan hopes the sport will keep opening similar doors for others.
Clubs in places like Christchurch have already begun installing lowered boards to accommodate wheelchair players, while the national organisation runs world ranking tournaments each year.
New Zealand is allowed to host four tournaments a year, with two events taking place in Christchurch on Anzac weekend, followed by two more in Pukekohe in June.
Winners of the tournament qualify for the World ParaDarts world championships and world masters, which take place yearly. Winning helps select a team for the World Cup, which happens every two years and takes two wheelchair and two standing players.
The goal is to be able to send two teams to Belgium this year.
At last year’s world champs in Hungary, Gillan and Morrison were drawn to face off in the first round, with the former coming out on top before finishing fifth equal.
Gillan’s long-term dream is simple – to see para darts become as visible as the professional darts seen on television.
Ben Francis is an Auckland-based reporter for the New Zealand Herald who covers breaking sports news.