Paintball

After that last post, this one should be much easier.

So, yup, I play paintball, a lot. Once a month is the absolute minimum, and now it's more often 2 or 3 weekends every month. So, from 8-25 hours per month practicing or playing, not counting time I spend drilling in the house.

I got started through a church small group in Pueblo. We called ourselves a Band of Brothers (after Shakespeare, not the silly TV show), and had a bible/book study, beat each other up in swordplay, played basketball and played paintball about every other month. One of the guys had been playing for about 10 years with his brother and friends in North Carolina, so he took us all out for the first time one frigid day in February. We played down on his parents' ranchland in Beulah, about 40 minutes south of Pueblo, in about 6 to 20 inches of snow, depending on if you were in a drift or not. Ryan and I had plastic pump markers from walmart, Larry and Josh had spyder clones, and Nathan, being the paintball expert, had a Tippmann 98, I believe. We froze our hindparts off, were soaking wet from the snow, and I'm pretty sure I didn't shoot anyone, but it was a blast!

Well, as time went on, we got more and more people out to the games. Over that next summer, I think we were getting about 40 friends from our church to go out with us, and some of us were really enjoying it a lot. The core 5, as we called ourselves, started a team, keeping the name Band of Brothers, and that really got us to take off. We organized and started drilling for a league called the SPPL, which is a national woods paintball tournament series. Actually, looking back, our drills were ridiculous. We didn't have the money to spend practicing with paint, so we had rubber band drills in the church on Sunday nights (take into account, these are fully grown men, for the most part).

All winter we prepared and organized and analyzed the rulebook. That June, 12 of us headed out to Oklahoma for our first event as a team. Nathan, Ryan and I were there from the original 5, plus Ryan's dad Scott, Joey and his dad John, my neighbor Craig and his dad Randy. Thomas, Aaron and Jaden came out from Alamosa, and Paul, his sister Jen, and his cousin Matt were there. Guess that's 14, not 12. Whoops.

Anyhow, looking back, we were incredibly lucky to get the schedule we did, for a few reasons. For one, we weren't pitted against any of the top-tier teams (this was back before teams were in seperate divisions based on skill), which gave us a confidence boost, and secondly, the two teams we played (US SOCOM and WolfGuard) have become some of our closest friends over the years. We actually won all of our games, I think, but only narrowly, and therefore weren't able to advance to the semi-finals and finals. No prizes for us. Except for the fact that in the SPPL, there is a sportsmanship award equal in value to the 1st place prize, which by some set of circumstance, we were awarded! There's a longer story behind that, but I'll keep moving. Anyhow, we came back honestly pretty proud of ourselves (we took home prizes in a National level event and won all our games), and that event really sparked a few of us to play more, become better, and focus to a large degree on playing the SPPL.

The next year, we went back to Oklahoma and to Utah, and had a really good time, although we never placed. As the league grew and became more popular, better teams were being attracted, teams with players who practiced every weekend or every other weekend, and practiced hard. As a group of players who played for fun, we really weren't on the same level.

I'll skip the rest of the backstory, and come to this past year, where I've been in Golden. Effectively, Band of Brothers is no more as several of us have moved to college or have shipped out with the Military (Joey is Army Scout Cav, Jaden is Navy SEALs), and many of the others are spending more time with their families. Because of this, and my personal change of location, I'm now playing with a team from Denver called BlackLight Company (www.blacklightcompany.org). BLC is a great team who we always enjoyed playing with or against in the past, and a team where one of my best friends in recent history plays, David "Torch" McClannahan. Torch and I are now entering our third year playing the SPPL together, and he's pushed me farther and harder than I ever would have gone on my own. We both play at the front lines, pushing into opponents territory, making the battle up close and personal. We both love a few types of paintball markers (particularly 'mags and Minis, for anyone who follows paintball), and we're both Christians doing our best to reflect Him in our actions on and off the field.

Anyhow, I played informally with BLC over this past year, at a lot of their recreational games and practices, and since I've had a lot of experience with the SPPL, I was advising them through their first season, in the newly founded Rookie Division. I also had the chance to guest with them at the Kansas Flood event. Yes, it was biblical-scale rain. Which causes interesting problems in competitive paintball. I also travelled with them to the SPPL National Finals in Georgia over Fall Break, where they took first in the series, and I reffed on another field.

Partially due to my brilliant play in Kansas, and partially due to my stunning good looks, BLC then invited me to become a full member of the team about a month ago. Ok, I'd be surprised if either contributed. But the short story is now that BLC is my new paintball family, and I couldn't be happier with any team in Colorado.

A lot of you will also know that I write about paintball. I'll save the entire story for later, but as it stands now, I run the Articles section of the webpage for Special Ops Paintball out of Salt Lake, Utah. It's a great job, a lot of fun, and they're taking good care of me, which has been a huge blessing. So, if you see this Greg, Jayson, Travis, Mo, thank you all!

There is a brief history of me in paintball. I wanted to get it out there to kind of cover the bases, if you want to see more or ask questions, leave a comment, and I'll elaborate. Just be careful. I can go on and on and on.

Lo