Are we Ready for Next Level of Paintball Leagues?
By Bret Golihew
Are we ready for the Next Level Professional Paintball League?
No, we are not ready and if we ever are, it won’t be paintball anymore. It will be something else, controlled as an entertainment, just like any other mainstream sport with elite prima donna professional athletes to do our playing for us.
The real question comes back to the very nature of paintball as a sporting activity. There is a fundamental flaw in paintball that precludes it from ever being an entertainment sport. The game is too short and has no real contestable object.
Imagine watching a hockey game that ends with the first goal. How much fun would that be? This is the situation in flag games. How much entertainment value would there be if 20 hockey teams held a televised tournament using this style? You wouldn’t have any idea who was winning what and when they were winning it. How interesting would football, basketball, soccer, or even tennis be if they played in a paintball tournament style and ended with the first goal?
The audience of any sporting entertainment event must bond with a team before they will get emotionally involved enough to cheer. A team using pump guns will get cheers because the audience will connect with them. If they used semiautomatic markers like everybody else, then they wouldn’t have been noticed. They are liked because they are interesting and courageous underdogs.
Entertainment sports require spectators to develop an interest in just one team. All other entertainment sports are about a contest between just two teams at a time for the entire entertainment period. Paintball will never be an entertainment sport until it has long matches between just a few teams that continually score goals without the game ending, except by time limit or total points scored per set.
Paintball has no uniform controllable object either. Imagine football without the football. Yeah, I know, paintball has a flag, but it is only a symbol of victory and requires no endurance to possess or transport. A paintball game is elimination first and then when the opposition is sufficiently neutralized, the flag comes into play. Paintball needs a football, or basketball equivalent that is held and contested over to score goals over several set time periods- like any other team sport!
Only then you will have long matches that expose a team’s heart, endurance, and spirit–the type of things that an audience wants to see. They want to see a team get kicked around for most of the game and then with a stunning reversal of fortune, come back to win the match. They will never sit and watch a bunch of impersonal anonymous little men hide behind little barricades shooting streams of paintballs at other anonymous little men for 3 minutes and then all run forward in victory. “Who was that?” they’ll say.
Paintball must become football with guns to have the kind of success that some feel it must have to legitimize their lives and reap them an emotional and monetary reward for their investment. The players will not be same as they are today too. They will all be little quick guys. The teams will be different as well- with increased playing times, there will be much fewer teams. It will be almost impossible to get a slot on the national level without major corporate ownership. Can you start your own NFL team? Whoever owns the league will sell the regional franchises.
You can forget just talent as the prime requirement of being on a team. It will be just like any other entertainment sport- money will buy the skills of specialized human specimens.Pro Sport Paintball will be to short people what the NBA is to tall ones. Hey, that’s ok.
The great beauty of Paintball is that the audience participates in it as a sport. Paintball is kind of original in this respect and I will mourn the day when it becomes just another form of mass entertainment by paid professionals. If and when that day comes, I hope they call it something else, because it won’t be our Paintball anymore. They should call it “Dough ball.”
Is this saying that I don’t think Paintball should be a Mainstream sport? No, not at all. It already is one and you just don’t realize it yet. This past Wednesday at Action Creek Paintball, Spring Grove, PA, I spent the afternoon reffing for a high school group that got off school to play Paintball. Cool Huh? 17 girls from a high school softball team played Paintball because they thought it would be fun. It was and they had a great time. None of them had ever played before, and by the end of the day, several of them did as well as some of you old pros would have done.
My point? Those who advocate a move to ‘Pro Sport’ do not understand that Paintball isn’t an elitist sport, confined to only a small segment of the population, like any other ‘Pro Sport’. Paintball is for everyone, always has been and always will be. Paintball is the great equalizer of sports and that is why it we all love it. Heck, some of us will even play it at a disadvantage just for the thrill of going against a more heavily armed opponent. What other sport can you do that in? Ok, Jousting, but we don’t do that anymore.
