Your Starting Out Story

My brother, father, sister and I got talons for christmas one year. we went out in the snow with our 10 round tubes and 12 gram co2 cartridges and played around for a while. It was awesome.

Stayed at it, and here I am.

I was stationed in the UK in '85 and the MWR (Morale. Welfare and Recreation) office promoted a trip to the first commercial paintball field to open in the country. They gave us Spatmasters and shop goggles and broke us up into teams of about two dozen each. Since it was a joint AF and Army trip, it was decided the teams would be AF vs. Army all day (bad). I and one other member of the AF side were security police (SP), everyone else were admin troops or cooks or stuff like that (very bad). The first game the Army guys left their flag unguarded and charged off through the woods to get our flag. They arrived before our team had even organized and when they came screaming into our base everyone but the other SP and I turned and ran away (very very bad). Our defense of the flag lasted aboout 3 seconds and we got shot a lot. For some reason, I thought this was fun, and have been hooked ever since. (Although I did take about a 12 year break when I got back to the states because I had to wait for paintball to catch on at the places I was stationed.)

I was about 28 or 29 and going to a Technical school full time at nights . This was around 1989 . Some friends mentioned "How cool it would to be to go out and play some paintball " They had heard of a place to go play . We planned a trip out to go see , and we all picked up some kind of marker , my friends got a couple of the green Splatmasters and I found a PGP , we loaded up on ammo and CO2 cartridges and went hunting the game ! (I think we in total had maybe 500 rounds for all three of us) .

My first game was "Indoors" Urban style in an old abandoned university building with LOTS of hallways , closets and bunches of smallish rooms . It was dark except for the few lightbulbs that still functioned , you could barely see sillouettes , shapes as people moved . Careful movement and listening identified the people in front of me as friends or Foes . As often as not , I was eliminated by my team , and likewise "Buck fever" (on my part) got a few of my team eliminated by friendly fire too . I felt badly about hitting my own teammates , but felt strangely proud of the shots I had to make to hit them !! I promised myself I would try extremely hard to not do anymore FF eliminations . ever since then , I've tried to improve my game ( with some Hiatuses of several years inbetween ) with some sucess .

 My second game outdoors in a wooded Utah canyon is what got the game firmly under my skin , I rigged up a burlap Ghille suit and crawled under a half dead bush and camped , it worked ,,,, the first guy up the trail got out , but his partner made short work of me after that .

 When you crawl under a thick bush , you can't up and run like you thought you could  .

Snipers do exist in paintball , but fact is , they dont live long

I was at a friends house. We went to the gravel pit out back and just started blasting each other (Black Maxx sucks) I got lit, and fell in love with the adrenaline rush.