Ready For Greatness My First Time Out... And Reality Hits

After so many games of paintball played on different fields with different people, it seems kind of strange to think back to the first time I went and remember what I expected. It's really strange to remember just how far off my expectations really were.

My first trip to play paintball was a father-son outing between my dad, myself and two of my brothers. Prior to our visit I had no direct experience with paintball and my indirect experience consisted of anecdotal stories related by my peers, so my imagination was free to run wild. Since I knew absolutely nothing of what paintball entailed, I was able to construct a fantasy game that turned out to be nothing like what I experienced.

For whatever reason, it seems that every prepubescent male who plays paintball wants to be a sniper and I was no exception. What I envisioned was sitting back at the end of the field and picking off the entire opposing team thanks to my superior marksmanship. Additionally, in my fantasy land I was confident that all I needed to succeed was my innate ability to shoot and my natural ability to predict what the other team would do. My only concern heading to play was whether my dad would cough up the extra money to rent me a semi-automatic gun or if I would be stuck with a pump.

Obviously, my actual experience was nothing like I imagined. Not only was I stuck with a basic pump (probably built around 1990) I somehow forgot to envision myself wearing an ill-fitting, oily mask that thoroughly obscured my vision. When I stepped onto the indoor field, I was first surprised at how dark everything was thanks to poor lighting and the lousy mask. I was really disgusted when I shot my gun and found that it's accuracy didn't extend much beyond thirty feet and a sniper shot was just about out of the question. During my time playing I spent the majority of each game huddled behind bunkers waiting for someone to walk out in front of me (the only person who did was a teammate, but somehow I still missed from ten feet away) and I soon learned that I didn't know the first thing about strategy - all my prior scheming, it turned out, depended heavily on the other team stepping out into the open and not firing at me.

After a few games, though, I did learn that I made an excellent target for the other team as long as I sat still. I learned that the game was a lot more fun if I followed someone who knew (or at least pretended to know) what they were doing and that paintball is a game of movement, even if you're trying to be a sniper.

Shortly before it was time to go home, I experienced the highlight of the night. While moving up the field I stopped behind a bunker because I thought I heard someone shooting at me. I peaked around one side and I saw the back of another player about thirty or forty feet away. To this day I remember the paintball's path as it went towards the other player and I remember as he called himself out. It was my only kill of the night, but this little bite of paintball reality gave me a taste of what the sport is all about.