The Nuclear Weapons of Paintball
by Jayson Orvis aka JOracle on Mar 29, 2005
How to wreak massive destruction on the opposition
Five, four, three, two, one. . . The game is on. A flurry of paintball guns pop and a couple of balls patter to the ground around you. But, you don’t care. You carry the ultimate paintball weapon.
You smile smugly to yourself, knowing that your secret will decimate the other team. Without hurrying, you begin walking toward high ground while reaching for the upper pocket on your vest, almost like you’re James Dean reaching for a packet of cigarettes. While the other team scuttles from bunker to bunker, you walk casually away, ready to unleash the full force of your weapon.
You lift the small device from your pocket and you find the button by touch. After a pause, you press it.
Then, you speak.
“All teams, this is Omega Leader,” You hold a Motorola radio in your hand and you command your squad leaders, “report in.”
“Omega Leader this is Alpha Leader.” Your radio crackles back, “We are on the enemy’s thirty-yard line and we’re moving up the riverbed. We’re ‘add three.’ Over.”
After a momentary pause, the radio barks again, “Omega Leader, this is Bravo Leader. We are ‘add two’ on the fifty-yard line. Down one. Over.”
“Omega Leader, this is Charlie Leader.” Your defense commander reports in, “We are add four, down zero and looking good. Over.”
You slip the radio back into your pocket and smile as you quietly work your way up the mountainside to the invigorating soundtrack of fierce paintball skirmishes erupting all over the field below. You now control the ultimate woodsball™ weapon: the well-trained paintball team.
If you’ve never seen a disciplined team work, then you’ve never seen woodsball™ at its finest. Most Saturdays and Sundays, we’re accustomed to seeing rag-tag walk-on teams slugging it out without rhyme or reason. On the other hand, it is truly harrowing to see a coordinated and practiced team surgically dismantle the opposition. You’ve got to see it to believe it.
During the twenty-somewhat years before whiz-bang “tourney” paintball became all the rage, professional paintball took place in the forests and fields of the backwoods. Sponsored, pro teams took to the brush and proved conclusively that a coordinated team could mash the hell out of a much larger band of uncoordinated walk-ons.
I spent many, many Saturdays as a practice dummy for the two-time world paintball champs, Team Navarone, at The Jungle field in Southern California. With diminutive pump pistols, these demigods of early paintball unstitched our hoards of walk-on semi-auto shooters week in and week out.
You simply can’t be a serious woodsball™ player without playing on a good team. Some delude themselves by claiming that they are “lone wolves” capable of personally annihilating the opposition without the help of their teammates. Certainly, everyone has occasional lucky streaks (even a pickup truck flies in a tornado,) but godlike paintball performance can only be achieved within the ranks of a tour de force.
Killer team paintball stands on three legs: planning, leadership and communication. Without one of these, your team’s just a bunch of cream puffs wearing the same camo.
Planning. While your plan can be very simple, you must all begin the game on the same sheet of music and stick to the plan (unless you get hammered and your Unit Commander calls a different play.) Deviating from the plan to run off and chase glory is one of the biggest reasons why team efforts collapse.
Leadership. One person must lead the team and one person must lead each squad. Paintball players are notoriously unruly and getting them to follow commands is very challenging. However, running a team and its squads like a freaking watch is the only way to unleash the raw destructive power of the woodsball™ team.
Communication. Using radios is much harder than one might imagine. Getting them to work reliably takes lots of practice. But, it’s really the only way to keep a woodsball™ team fighting like a well-oiled machine. If you master your radio protocols, you will be forever superior to the opposition. Give it the time and attention you would give the ultimate secret weapon. (If it were easy, everyone would be doing it.)
Without a doubt, paintballers are a rebellious and restless crowd. They rankle at the suggestion that they should plan, communicate and obey commands. That’s probably why there are so few effective teams out there.
And, that’s probably why those teams kick the trash out of the rest of us.