Sunday was the big paintball outing that had originally been scheduled for last week. We had 7 people — Corwin and his Dad, Jack and his dad, Keith and his dad, and Josh who was too scary to have a parent along.
We met at noon and managed to get on the road by 12:30, which I thought was excellent since I had started prepping the equipment at 6:30 AM. We got everyone checked in and started shooting around 1:30 PM.
There was another son and dad there, plus a few guys from the team that’s based at the field. I had been worried about playing with random people but the other guys all played well so it was a good time. It was about 95° and humid so it was some tough playing. Josh and I were the only ones who played every game, about 10. We mostly played in wooded fields with lots of junk for cover, and a couple of games on a speed ball field. No one was much for speed ball, but the other guys wanted to and I thought it would be good to at least experience it before judging. They still didn’t like it much afterwards, but now they can say “I’ve tried it”.
The boys played well, especially for first timers. They used cover, they kept low while moving fast, and actually shot at the other players. Their accuracy wasn’t bad either. The one thing they did wrong was bunching up too much, sometimes having three of them behind a small bunker with barely enough cover for all of them. Jack’s dad was particularly aggressive. He would have done great if the kids had provided better fire support. But as it turned out, at least once Jack’s dad took an excellent forward position which was, unfortunately, past an opponent who was able to just turn around and take him out. The last game went much better, with the boys doing very well in helping out on a right sweep, spreading out across the bunkers and moving up as the point man (one of the team guys) pushed forward. Since it was the last game, and we can’t re-use the paintballs for another day I told the boys to fire freely, which they did, leaving just 500 rounds of a total of 3000 as remains.
I think everyone had a good time. None of the markers failed in the field and we didn’t even run out of CO2. The one thing that I will need to have people bring next time is belts — I don’t think anyone else had one and I only had two spare.
I managed to get some serious bruises. I need to wear some arm protection next time.
I had called the field the day before, to verify that it would be open, and the owner mentioned to me that there was a large group (~40 people) arriving later. I thought we might mix with them, bt they didn’t arrive until just as we were leaving (a bit odd, given that it was 4:30 and the field officially closes at 5 on Sundays). The funny part was that the boy’s class mate and soccer team mate Nolan was part of that crew, on his first paintball outing. I wonder if they’ll get around to comparing notes, later.
I was so tired afterwards that I just lay around the house until it was time for bed.