Journal+3+-+Photograph

http://www.flickr.com/photos/paintballphotos/4524723100/

This picture reminds me of when I went to Dillsburg to watch the EPL (Eastern Paintball League) tournament. There was about 20 serious paintball teams that were there to compete for the 2010 title. While I was there I talked to the one player who has been on a team for an outstanding 15 years! This gentlemen told me all about the sacrifices he makes for the team that he is on and all of sponsors it takes to be on a team. He told me that paintballers need sponsors because they go through 2000 rounds of paintballs every match! To put that in prospective for people that don't play paintball, that is 50 dollars for every five minute game. The sponsors give the players free paintballs as long as the players are willing to put the sponsor's name or logo on their jersey. Also, the teams overall get a couple sponsors so that the coach can get the players discounts on guns that are technologically advanced to give the players the edge in accuracy, feed rate, and velocity. (Normal tournament grade paintball guns shoot 30 plus balls per second and are usually around 1,000 dollars.) The man also told me about what he goes through to become a better paintball player. He told me that to increase his accuracy he first starts with buckets. He places four buckets randomly around the field and then sprints down the middle of the field and tries to hit each bucket with only one ball. After he was consistent with shooting buckets in one ball he moved down in size to small orange cones and so on until he was consistent enough to hit decks of cards with just one ball each. I then asked him why he moved down in size to decks of cards because people are much bigger than a tiny deck of cards. His answer to my question was that even though people are larger than decks of cards, sometimes when you are playing in a game all you can see is the tip of someone's gun or mask so in order to win, you need to be able to hit that little of a area on a person's body. That is why this picture reminded me of the time that I went to watch the EPL tournament.