Maintaining a steady player base on your team

What is the importance of keeping a steady player base?

Starting a paintball team is only half the battle. What lies ahead is the real challenge; a barrage of phone calls, meetings, practices, missed days, discipline, and maybe an ounce of fun. Just kidding, a team can be a lot of fun, but will also require a lot of work. A team is a responsibility, an on-going effort to become a better group of players. Perhaps one of the biggest challenges is keeping a steady player base, i.e. finding dependable players and making them play.

So what does a steady player base mean? Let us assume, for the remainder of this article, that we are discussing a three player team. A group of friends gets together and forms a 3-man team to compete in local tournaments. Sounds easy? What could possibly go wrong.

Here at the Paintball Times we started a staff team. I recruited a few players I knew and began entering our team into local tournaments. As you can tell from our Tournement Results we did not fare so well. Why?

Each one of our players has great individual skills and excells in a different area. So what was our problem? Was it on the field communication and coordination? No.

Our main problem was inconsistency in our team. One day our Editor-in-Chief can’t make it, another day one of our key players says he can’t focus (is busy), another day one guy is out of money, and on another day one of them has to go out of town to visit long lost relatives. These situations actually happened to us. Sometimes we were scrambling for players. Once I even threw in my 12 year old brother.

That is the first problem, so what is the second problem? Playing all your players. I remember one day a fourth player showed up and paid. HE was not a very good player, but we had to play him since he paid. We maxed our first two games in a row, then amassed a big huge zero. Why? We lost our momentum and morale. Changing players in the middle of an event can adversely affect the outcome and play. If you have an alternate player, they should not pay, and should understand that they may not get to play. That can improve your game. Unless of course all of you are equally as skilled.

So what is the moral of the story? Make sure you have enough players, and then make sure you don’t substitue too often once you have a game plan and high morale established.