Sigh... I had hoped we'd be done by 3pm EST, but everything was running behind schedule and people were playing overtime periods, so we didn't finish until about 6pm. So, I was already late. STV250 is not really working because I forgot how to connect, but if I remember correctly this is supposed to be a free blog wrapping up the end of your assigned blogs. Overall, I haven't minded doing these assignments, and I find that I can jabber a lot on these things (hence my large posts). I think I will keep a blog about this tournament experience as a way of closing out my blog and the end of my first collegiate paintball season with ISU... So, yeah it's gonna be long and about paintball, but it is what it is so you can read if you want. If you have to comment on my stuff... eh, sucks for you haha because I write a lot and you're probably not interested enough to read about me. I can't blame you; I'm not very interesting.
Anyway, here's a little bit of background as to why I'm in Florida right now. The National Collegiate Paintball Association hosts the National Championships at the end of every season, and it's pretty much the biggest event of the college paintball scene. Unfortunately, no one knows about college paintball or really cares about college paintball, so the only thing that keeps this stuff going on is the interest coming from the college players themselves. Sure there's TV coverage, but no one cares about your sport because of course, people find the fact that you are marking someone with a glatine capsule that inflicts a sense of paint to be violent. Yet other popular sports are much more violent physically if you think about it... *cough cough* all those contact sports the macho boys love to play like football and hockey.
I won't get into a rant about that. This event used to have big sponsors like JT USA, a big paintball and racing(?) company, but with the crappy economy and the expensive aspect of paintball they dropped their sponsorships so now paintballs are $10 more for a box of 2000 rounds a.k.a "a case". There's not even one vendor at this event unlike other big paintball circuits like the PSP, USPL, and Millennium Series, but of course those incorporate the pro teams playing, and consequently draw in a bigger crowd. No one is interested in a bunch of scrubby, broke college kids. haha. Which I can't blame them because honestly, how much money would a vendor make at a college event when almost every team there had to fork over at least $200 at the least per player to be here? Some schools like UConn, Ohio University, and Penn State are lucky enough to have full funding from their university, but most like us from Illinois State have very little funding or have lost funding, so basically... having vendors here is pointless for them since we're all cheap and broke. Today started the tournament with Class A (also known as College Xball). It's a division in which teams play as many 5-vs-5 games within a certain time limit with sideline coaching and hockey-like penalties. This is more of a sport as it requires a lot of physical athleticism than one would think. Class A will run until Sunday, and then Class AA (or College 5man) starts tomorrow. College 5man is different because there's only one game played with about a 5min time limit and no coaching. There's also a point system that runs based on who is still in after the game ends and how many people dropped on the other team. Scores often look like 98-6 or something like that while Class A has scores that appear like 5-4 or 12-2. I'm playing both divisions, so tomorrow will be a huge paintball day tomorrow with overlapping schedules. I'm not sure how I'll be able to handle this physically, but we'll see. All I know is that I'll have a lot of fun either way.
Today was a bit rough at the start. We had three Class A matches to play throughout the day and we unfortunately lost to the University of Maryland. The refs weren't making good calls at all, and penalties should have been assessed that were missed. Then we also ran into some issues with our sideline coaching, so our team pretty much lost our cool with everything and lost our momentum. The ending score was 6-5. I did not play this round because due to the depth of our team, there's a lot of competition for the top spots and it was painful to swallow because these weren't the teams we were expecting to have a lot of trouble with, but that's just the nature of the game. Anyone can be anyone on any given day, so we didn't come out there with the right attitude and we slowly lost it. We went down with a fight, so that was good.
The next game was against University of Tennessee, and it was a back and forth fight up until the last two minutes of the game. Thankfully our guys shot one of their guys off the break and so the whole game basically started off at 4-vs-5 and we just picked them off one by one winning the match with a final score of at 6-5? I think. It was something like that. Then we played Northeastern University and quickly got up on points, so our benchwarmers (me and 5 other rostered players) could get it. We played the whole second half and kept the momentum. played all over the field, diving and sliding around and shooting people. It was definitely the best I played and I was very happy with myself eventhough I had some big blunders as well. I didn't know how to come out of the penalty box properly without getting shot by 4 people, and so I also tripped over the sideline rope and fell into at least 10 paintballs. That was basically an epic FAIL haha. Afterwards my coach gave me tips to get out without getting shot within two seconds, but it would have been nice to know about that before hand. Oh well. During my last game I made a big dive to a bunker that was 20feet in front of me and some how cut my left hand on something in the grass. I didn't notice it until afterwards, but now I have a dirt-filled somewhat shallow but long cut on my hand that may get infected. Oh well.
So with the day ending, and registration for Class AA going on, we had to stay for an extra hour standing around to get all our paper work done. To pass time by, the team was talking about costs and such and we found out that our paint bill for today's matches was... 28 cases x 45 per case = $1260!!!! HOLY CRAP! That's about how much I make in one whole year working a poopy minimum wage job. The bill should be around $980 for 28 cases. The team could have saved $280 and maybe even assisted in funding other things for the team such as gas and transportation. It's moments like these which make me question why I still play this expensive sport, but there's something about it that I love and I wouldn't trade it for any other experience.
END PART 1
No comments:
Post a Comment