Paintball

[agentSmith]

Well, I can't believe what a great time I had!!!
Sixteen teams, including some from as far away as Florida converged on Hell Survivors in Michigan, for the 07 Michigan Qualifier for the Scenario Paintball Player's League Finals in Oklahoma.
For full reports on all the games, the SpecOps forum has an SPPL section, but I wanted to tell my little slice.

My legs 'sorta hurt', at least the middle there where 'I THINK' the knees are supposed to go!

What a great event, with new, veteran and even pro players from around the country. Everyone seemed to have great fun and I'm really proud of all my friends on the HS crew as well as the HS Mercs and others who Reffed for us, they did a great job not only reffing an unfamiliar complicated format on new field layouts, but of representing my favorite paintball field in the world and got universal praise for their calm professionalism. Thanks of course to Dave and Ed and Company at Hell Survivors for originally taking the chance on getting this great event for HS, part of the reason the SPPL is growing is the great job they've done putting on their event the last two years. Last year, we needed 10 teams and the 10th registered a week before the cutoff, but this year we could take 16 and 20 applied! Next year will be 3 fields and 24 teams! People really like the level of sportsmanship being as high or higher than the level of play.

All of our local teams held up well, the nature of the SPPL scoring is such that sometimes the score doesn't reflect how close the games were, but as I've known all along from my paintball travels, HS has a very high level of play in both open class and the big games. We're all still getting used to the ins and outs of this format and things can be a little tricky with airstrikes and rebreaks and Forced Intel but as time goes on I think HS teams will remain a force to be reckoned with.

I'm most proud of my fellow Great Lakes Rangers for TAKING SECOND!!! WHOOO! What a time we had, no Prima-Donnas, no conflict, people checking each other's backs for hits, trading gear and swapping masks(the rain and heat were BRUTAL for fog!!!). I can't say too much what a joy these guys are to play for! I've even changed my sig!

I did my little bit to help them but in my opinion any one of these guys could captain their own team, smart people, good players and most of all GOOD SPORTSMEN!!!
Not just good sports for their play on the field(during one game we used our 'Intel' objective which means the refs and other team must pass along info on their whereabouts, etc-whatever you ask, to find out "If the other team was having a good time", they were and everyone got a big laugh out of it!), but good sports for giving an old guy with a pair of pistols a chance to play against the Pros!

That's us on sunday after the Finals, sporting the rained on look!

We were undefeated until we ran into the Pros.

Pros they were too! Smart Corps played hard in the finals but extremely fair, speaking as someone who's played against them, I would play them again any time(not expecting to win, just for the fun of it)!
They withdrew to let us re-insert and gave us our fair shot to get to cover, but WOW are they good! Stories of them just shooting tons of paint to win in the SPPL are FALSE, they eliminated me three times as our 'commander' on the field(our team Captain, Beaker wanted to get out there and mix it up and commander kills cost extra points) and in every case, it was THE FIRST OR ONLY ball out of someone's gun that did me in and the minute I called myself out all incoming fire cut right off, I was only hit 5 times for 3 eliminations. They also were nice in the deadzone, actually loaning out markers to players from other teams and helping to get markers running again. They wisely understand that the SPPL draws people who are fanatics about sportsmanship and they represented that ethic well for their company and turned a few heads. I personally think they also enjoyed the atmosphere of us all being set up together laughing and joking, so different from the cutthroat world of speedball tourneys.

One of my favorite moments came on saturday and for exactly ONCE in my paintball life, there was someone around with a camera!

The great guy from Paintball Photography - Official Home Page stood on the lip of the Master field bowl and captured this photo of me about 10 feet below him hanging from a root by my left hand with my knee wedged against a rock. In this position I had a clear view through a kneehigh hole in the brush 100' to the tapeline and was able to spot incoming opponents for my teammates to pick up and got one nice elimination myself on a guy who STILL has no idea where I was!
that Paintballphotgraphy website has almost 300 pics of the action.

Once again, GOOD TIMES!!!
and Oklahoma here we come!!!
Rob

[Compulsion]

Awesome writeup.

Sounds like a good time.

SmartParts has a bad name some places because of its leveraging lawsuits in business battles, but it's good to see that at least they play a stand-up game of paintball.