In our last article, we celebrated the first two league champions of the year. Since then, three further winners have been crowned. Let’s take a look: South West – the South West race has been an interesting and tight one this year. This region may be the new kid on the block, but you wouldn’t think it. Some of the area’s very best impressed back in February in the Cotswolds Classic. That day, it was Oxford’s Musa Ali who took home the title and now his university have taken home the regional trophy too. They just about held off Bath in one of this season’s most interesting title races, losing only 2 matches all campaign. Impressive indeed. North Central – in the North Central region, it was another close run thing. This time, it was an old hand who came out on top as Sheffield edged out close opposition in Lincoln to take the regional accolade. And it all went down to a last-match decider to add to the tension. North Central has long been a prodigious part of the country as far as uni darts talent is concerned, and it may well be the case that the national trophy makes only the small journey along the M1 from Leeds. North East – forget City and Arsenal, the exciting title races are all in UDUK. This time, York managed to hold off 2022 national finalists Newcastle on the last day to prise the title from Durham’s hands. It is an impressive finish from York in another fiercely contested league. <h2>National Finals 2023 </h2> Since the last blog post, we have revealed the lucky teams making the trip to Loughborough on 23 April for the National Finals. Four of our five league champions have secured a spot: Warwick, Oxford, Sheffield and York. Sadly, Lancaster are unable to attend, with North West runners-up Bangor making the visit in their absence. Alongside those five, three of the ‘best of the rest’ have also qualified. This proved a difficult challenge for UDUK HQ, with the fairest metric of points-per-game used to decide the participants. And so joining those automatically qualified are Durham, Trent and Lincoln. With so many of our league campaigns going down to the wire, and with the best UDUK talent spread across the country, Finals day promises to be exciting and unpredictable. Keep an eye on the usual UDUK feeds for further information and possibly some more preview material.

Around the Leagues: Update 3 (including National Finals preview)