My first tournament

I participated in my first ever paintball tournament yesterday, and overall it was a pretty great time.

I was asked a few weeks ago to join a 5 man “Rookie” team for this event and I was so excited I eagerly said “yes” without really thinking. Later of course, I would remember that October 17th was my wedding anniversary (duh!) When I finally woke up I tried to find a sub, but the best I could do was to get someone who could play in the afternoon.

I’m not one to bail on an obligation, so yesterday morning I headed out to “Captain Carls“, just south of Philadelphia. I’m glad I did.

The Rookie portion of the tourney had 24 teams of 5, broken down to 3 divisions of 8 teams. Basically each team plays all of the others once, and then the top 2 teams in points in each division move on to the semi-finals. 2 more teams get into the semis as wild cards (based on who has the most points among the 3 divisions.) Games are 5 minutes each.

I played in 6 games, and we won all 6. I got hit only once, shot 6 opponents out, and grabbed the flag and hung it once. After that, I handed off to a friend and headed home. My team won another game to go to 7-0 before I left.

There were 3 fields, a couple of which were very muddy. Still, that only made things more interesting.

The event itself was well organized. Lots of give-a-ways like posters, stickers, and magazines, some neat door prizes, and a highly energized group of players. Upcoming games were announced via loudspeaker and there wasn’t a lot of downtime between matches.

One notable game featured us against the “Hawaiian Twisters”. We took to our bunkers and basically played to a stalemate for 3 minutes. Several of my teammates carried stopwatches that beeped at various time increments so we were aware of how much time we had left. At this point we realized we need to make a move to score some points, but we didn’t want to do anything foolish. Finally our back guy shot out one of their right side guys and that allowed us to move up. We quickly got an advantage, but now it was down to about 1 minute left. I found myself up at the 50, so I made a lateral run for the flag – grabbed it, and slid backwards into a 2 1/2 foot tall tube-like bunker extending perpendicular towards the middle of the field from the right side snake. Unfortunately this position was also 2 inches of mud and water. The flag grab alone was worth 20 points, so I just laid there in the muck and waited for my teammates to go to work. They finished off all but the last player, and shouted for me to hang the flag. I jumped up and lurched towards the enemy base while my team kept the last guy in by laying paint on his bunker. I hung the flag with less than 5 seconds left in the game, giving us another 50 points. Talk about adrenaline…! The field was so muddy I almost slipped on my ass 10 feet from the flag station.

The funny part about today is that we had never played together before as a team, we all had mismatched jerseys and pants, and we really stood out amongst all the other teams with matching colors and names on their backs.

A teammate and I got interviewed (on camera) by the folks filming for RASPN.
We may very well make it to the broadcast on Comcast and/or the dvd. If you’re located in the Delaware County PA, you can watch the tourney footage every Saturday in November on Comcast Leased Access Channel 76 @ noon.

UPDATE – Turns out my team won their final division game to go to 8-0. In the semis (I am told) the home teams got extremely preferential treatment. To the point where multiple hopper and mask hits were wiped off by the refs with no explanation given to our team. This seems pretty foul if true. I’m sort of glad I wasn’t there to experience it because it would’ve ended an otherwise great day on a sour note. It supposedly got so bad that at one point the spectators were booing the refs.

Anyway, I’m glad I got some play in. It was a great first experience at tourney play and I’ll definitely be back. Pictures from the event can be found here.