The Problem with Talking Teamwork
I am often amazed just how resilient some ideas about paintball are in the face of actual playing experience; in this case I am talking about the perceived prioritisation of communication and teamwork.
If you were to ask most players at all levels of the game, ‘what is the most important component of playing paintball’, a lot of them would answer ‘teamwork’ or ‘communication’.
These seem to be persistent buzzwords of our sport and I am sure most of you have heard these used many times before.
It is true however, they are important but just so’s you know how important and how critical to a teams repertoire of skills they are, I want you to consider the following.
But before I get started, I am gonna reference an old friend of mine, Albert Einstein.
He’s best known I suppose for his work on special and general relativity in the early 1900's.
In pursuit of his theorems, he had to develop a different way of working [thinking] because it wasn’t really practical to shove the known cosmos into a test-tube and wave it over a Bunsen burner.
He had to imagine an experimental set up, and then conduct that experiment entirely in his mind and then draw his conclusions; this is called an ‘a-priori’ procedure because it is completely devoid of a practical experiment and is purely in his bonce. And I am gonna use just such a mechanism in the explanations of my idea..sounds a tad pretentious I know but fack it, I don’t care.
The reason I am gonna use this is, like Bert, I can’t shove a couple of paintball teams into a distillation tube and then boil its ass off to see what would happen.
My experimental remit is somewhat restricted in this sense and so here we go on a proposed thought experiment:-
And so, let’s tackle the concept of communication; imagine a team going out to play and not being able to utter a word during the game.
First off, are we saying that a team who does this has no chance of winning ?
Obviously not because many a time I have played in games where hardly a word has been said all game and we just rolled the opponents.
In fact, I would go so far to say that a lot of the games that are played would still be won if the power of speech were taken away.
But what does this tell us about the game or rather the importance of communication ?
Well, I will be foolhardy to suggest that communication is not important or was not even used in any of the games where not much was said.
In fact, a lot of the communication required to win games is visual, i.e. you see your pal moving down the tape and you either back him up with paint or you get your ass up the tape with him.
You may also see one of your opponents make a move and bam!
You react quickly and go bunker his ass outa there, either way; you can see that a lot of the game relies on a visual stimulus rather than the serial relaying of verbal communication.
What we can say also is, verbal communication can grease the way for a more refined and efficient level of play as long as that communication is relevant and timely of course.
But at best, it is a minor player in the game overall; important? Yes, of course but not the all-embracing number one pre-requisite some people would have you believe.
We didn’t have to actually play the game proposed but our experience and commonsense enabled all of us to appreciate that if such a game were to be played, then it certainly wouldn’t preclude any team from winning.
OK, next thought experiment coming up, let’s tackle the concept of teamwork.
Imagine a game where one team cannot utilise teamwork.
OK, a difficult one to imagine because you first have to try and define what teamwork actually means and then not use it in a game.
Teamwork is one of those things that you think you know what it is till someone asks you to define it and then the problems start... and so, for the purposes of this article, I am gonna attempt to do just that, define what teamwork is, leastwise in a paintball sense.
Teamwork means the co-ordinated actions of two or more players that facilitates a particular game advantage.
This in general terms is what teamwork means in paintball.
OK, how many games have you guys and gals seen where one team just sits behind their bunker positions, in effect, they have their asses Super-glued to their primary run out points.
Damn, I wish I had a dollar for the amount of games I have seen like that, I mean I used to play on the All Americans for a couple of years where you were thrown off the team if you ever made a forward move; OK I exaggerate a little but I’m sure you lot have all seen examples of play that are about as aggressive as a Koala bear.
The point here is that teamwork can easily be taken out of the equation by a team just sitting there, letting their opponents make the moves and the purely technical side of the game deciding who is the winner.
The point here is, it’s not impossible to win a game playing this way, far from it in fact, it’s called counter-punch paintball, a game entirely devoid of teamwork.
So, we don’t need teamwork to win but I do agree it does help in the same way communication does.
At this point, we can marry these two thought experiments and imagine a game where we impose no talking [communication] and no teamwork; we can now ask, is it now impossible for the team to win?
No, of course it isn’t, it’s not impossible at all; it is more difficult yes but not impossible.
So in one fell swoop, we have taken out communication and teamwork and exposed these impostors for what they truly are, they are merely pretenders to the throne of importance.
Teamwork, nor communication are the most important components of paintball play but to listen to some people they are, but why do people persist with this line of thinking?
A lot of people who you will hear say things like this have been playing years and they should all know better but I’m sure it can still be heard across many a paintball site.
It seems as though teamwork and communication ‘should’ be all important and the people who say it is, are merely following what they ‘think’ is the case rather than what is.
But does this revelation help us in understanding paintball?
Well I think it does because if most players are going around indulging themselves in this bullsh!t then how many are using up valuable practice time trying to refine a component that in itself, is nowhere near as important as some would suggest ?
So to move forward, I had better allocate the correct degree of importance to teamwork and communication that a team should assign to any given day’s practice.
Training is all about having the correct order of importance applied to the differing components of play and then assigning each component with an appropriate slot.
The more important, the longer the period you should concentrate upon it.
Just to give you guys a practical example of just what can be achieved, I need you to accept the following line of thinking.
Even though teamwork is an elusive component of play, I think it right to suggest that if we put together a bunch of guys who had not previously played together, then any idea of teamwork has to be abandoned if and when they play.
I am not suggesting there will be no teamwork, I am just saying the team will not have had any chance to refine their playing together and so you would think their teamwork might well be compromised.
One such American put-together team won the Campaign Cup a few years back beating all others, the likes of Dynasty and the rest were brushed aside and this disjointed bunch of pros walked off with the silverware.
These guys were made up of pros from differing teams across the US and just fancied the trip over and a game of ball ..... kinda makes ya wanna vomit when the Yanks can pull that kinda stroke outa their ass ... just goes to show, if you got the skills, you get the kills ... I just made that up .... I think I’ll do a t shirt with that on J
Anyway, I hope this example makes the point regarding teamwork.
OK, I have now de-constructed the traditional thinking behind paintball so I had better rebuild it if I wish to produce anything positive.
So where do we go from here?
I have hopefully realigned people’s thinking a little and consequently opened up people’s minds to some maybe non-traditional ideas.
We have imagined a game with no verbal communication, the team can still win!
We have also imagined a game with no teamwork, the team can still win.
On top of that we have imagined a team playing with no verbal communication and no teamwork and dammit, the team can still frikkin win.
But imagine a team paying no attention to playing tight, they go out, stand behind their bunkers and shoot container loads of paint with their asses hanging out all over the place, how long they gonna last, five seconds in today’s games?
Can teams win any games playing like this?
Well you can, but only if the other team has had all their retinas blown out with a nail gun.
Now imagine a team, who pays little attention to shooting straight, in other words, these guys can hit jack-sh!t, the game would maybe last longer than the previous one but eventually every team who played like this would get their ass fedex’d to them for obvious reasons.
Basically the other team would just whittle them down as the game progressed.
So in using another couple of Einsteinian thought experiments we have established what the true kings of paintball skills are, not communication, not teamwork but tightness and the ability to shoot straight.
I am not saying we should not have a comms package; teams need one for God’s sake but let’s get things in perspective.
It would take about five minutes to work out some sort of coded package that more than takes care of what would be needed in a game of paintball.
You need a head count for both sides, a couple of coded words for different situations and that’s about it.
Any more than that and it start to gets confusing and is ultimately counter-productive anyway.
As for teamwork or rather practicing it?
Bullsh!t, bullsh!t, bullsh!t!!!!!!
The game as it now stands, determines that players who have gained enough experience and skill at the pro level, if put together in a team, have the ability to produce, on the day, the necessary degree of teamwork to win games.
We all play off one another at some, if not all stages of the game.
Your pal shoots an opposite line man and it enables you to make a move or shoot another angle, your team-mate calls for suppressive fire as he moves, you give it,
you see your left flank blowing a tape; you move with them or shoot cover.
All of these are examples of teamwork and are generally achieved by players becoming experienced at what they do and the way they do it.
Teamwork is an emergent property of playing together over a protracted period of time together ... teamwork is an organic concept, adapting and evolving game after game.
To try and train teamwork really is like chasing shadows ...
The real good part of all this, the number one and number two most important parts of our game, that of playing tight and shooting accurately are easily trained and I am gonna do a vid of just how to snap shoot correctly.
It was developed in 2003 and has never and will never be bettered ...
I am gonna ask Ledz to send me down some gear and I’ll shoot it some time over the next week or so .. I might even do it at the next CPPS or NSPL if I can get there.
I will tell you one thing about this snap-shot, it transformed all of the Nexus players in 2003 once they had nailed it; it took a bit of getting used to but once they had, it turned them all into killing machines and was one of the main reasons why those original guys went from chumps to champs [uk] within a few months.
Laterz mortalz
Robbo
I am often amazed just how resilient some ideas about paintball are in the face of actual playing experience; in this case I am talking about the perceived prioritisation of communication and teamwork.
If you were to ask most players at all levels of the game, ‘what is the most important component of playing paintball’, a lot of them would answer ‘teamwork’ or ‘communication’.
These seem to be persistent buzzwords of our sport and I am sure most of you have heard these used many times before.
It is true however, they are important but just so’s you know how important and how critical to a teams repertoire of skills they are, I want you to consider the following.
But before I get started, I am gonna reference an old friend of mine, Albert Einstein.
He’s best known I suppose for his work on special and general relativity in the early 1900's.
In pursuit of his theorems, he had to develop a different way of working [thinking] because it wasn’t really practical to shove the known cosmos into a test-tube and wave it over a Bunsen burner.
He had to imagine an experimental set up, and then conduct that experiment entirely in his mind and then draw his conclusions; this is called an ‘a-priori’ procedure because it is completely devoid of a practical experiment and is purely in his bonce. And I am gonna use just such a mechanism in the explanations of my idea..sounds a tad pretentious I know but fack it, I don’t care.
The reason I am gonna use this is, like Bert, I can’t shove a couple of paintball teams into a distillation tube and then boil its ass off to see what would happen.
My experimental remit is somewhat restricted in this sense and so here we go on a proposed thought experiment:-
And so, let’s tackle the concept of communication; imagine a team going out to play and not being able to utter a word during the game.
First off, are we saying that a team who does this has no chance of winning ?
Obviously not because many a time I have played in games where hardly a word has been said all game and we just rolled the opponents.
In fact, I would go so far to say that a lot of the games that are played would still be won if the power of speech were taken away.
But what does this tell us about the game or rather the importance of communication ?
Well, I will be foolhardy to suggest that communication is not important or was not even used in any of the games where not much was said.
In fact, a lot of the communication required to win games is visual, i.e. you see your pal moving down the tape and you either back him up with paint or you get your ass up the tape with him.
You may also see one of your opponents make a move and bam!
You react quickly and go bunker his ass outa there, either way; you can see that a lot of the game relies on a visual stimulus rather than the serial relaying of verbal communication.
What we can say also is, verbal communication can grease the way for a more refined and efficient level of play as long as that communication is relevant and timely of course.
But at best, it is a minor player in the game overall; important? Yes, of course but not the all-embracing number one pre-requisite some people would have you believe.
We didn’t have to actually play the game proposed but our experience and commonsense enabled all of us to appreciate that if such a game were to be played, then it certainly wouldn’t preclude any team from winning.
OK, next thought experiment coming up, let’s tackle the concept of teamwork.
Imagine a game where one team cannot utilise teamwork.
OK, a difficult one to imagine because you first have to try and define what teamwork actually means and then not use it in a game.
Teamwork is one of those things that you think you know what it is till someone asks you to define it and then the problems start... and so, for the purposes of this article, I am gonna attempt to do just that, define what teamwork is, leastwise in a paintball sense.
Teamwork means the co-ordinated actions of two or more players that facilitates a particular game advantage.
This in general terms is what teamwork means in paintball.
OK, how many games have you guys and gals seen where one team just sits behind their bunker positions, in effect, they have their asses Super-glued to their primary run out points.
Damn, I wish I had a dollar for the amount of games I have seen like that, I mean I used to play on the All Americans for a couple of years where you were thrown off the team if you ever made a forward move; OK I exaggerate a little but I’m sure you lot have all seen examples of play that are about as aggressive as a Koala bear.
The point here is that teamwork can easily be taken out of the equation by a team just sitting there, letting their opponents make the moves and the purely technical side of the game deciding who is the winner.
The point here is, it’s not impossible to win a game playing this way, far from it in fact, it’s called counter-punch paintball, a game entirely devoid of teamwork.
So, we don’t need teamwork to win but I do agree it does help in the same way communication does.
At this point, we can marry these two thought experiments and imagine a game where we impose no talking [communication] and no teamwork; we can now ask, is it now impossible for the team to win?
No, of course it isn’t, it’s not impossible at all; it is more difficult yes but not impossible.
So in one fell swoop, we have taken out communication and teamwork and exposed these impostors for what they truly are, they are merely pretenders to the throne of importance.
Teamwork, nor communication are the most important components of paintball play but to listen to some people they are, but why do people persist with this line of thinking?
A lot of people who you will hear say things like this have been playing years and they should all know better but I’m sure it can still be heard across many a paintball site.
It seems as though teamwork and communication ‘should’ be all important and the people who say it is, are merely following what they ‘think’ is the case rather than what is.
But does this revelation help us in understanding paintball?
Well I think it does because if most players are going around indulging themselves in this bullsh!t then how many are using up valuable practice time trying to refine a component that in itself, is nowhere near as important as some would suggest ?
So to move forward, I had better allocate the correct degree of importance to teamwork and communication that a team should assign to any given day’s practice.
Training is all about having the correct order of importance applied to the differing components of play and then assigning each component with an appropriate slot.
The more important, the longer the period you should concentrate upon it.
Just to give you guys a practical example of just what can be achieved, I need you to accept the following line of thinking.
Even though teamwork is an elusive component of play, I think it right to suggest that if we put together a bunch of guys who had not previously played together, then any idea of teamwork has to be abandoned if and when they play.
I am not suggesting there will be no teamwork, I am just saying the team will not have had any chance to refine their playing together and so you would think their teamwork might well be compromised.
One such American put-together team won the Campaign Cup a few years back beating all others, the likes of Dynasty and the rest were brushed aside and this disjointed bunch of pros walked off with the silverware.
These guys were made up of pros from differing teams across the US and just fancied the trip over and a game of ball ..... kinda makes ya wanna vomit when the Yanks can pull that kinda stroke outa their ass ... just goes to show, if you got the skills, you get the kills ... I just made that up .... I think I’ll do a t shirt with that on J
Anyway, I hope this example makes the point regarding teamwork.
OK, I have now de-constructed the traditional thinking behind paintball so I had better rebuild it if I wish to produce anything positive.
So where do we go from here?
I have hopefully realigned people’s thinking a little and consequently opened up people’s minds to some maybe non-traditional ideas.
We have imagined a game with no verbal communication, the team can still win!
We have also imagined a game with no teamwork, the team can still win.
On top of that we have imagined a team playing with no verbal communication and no teamwork and dammit, the team can still frikkin win.
But imagine a team paying no attention to playing tight, they go out, stand behind their bunkers and shoot container loads of paint with their asses hanging out all over the place, how long they gonna last, five seconds in today’s games?
Can teams win any games playing like this?
Well you can, but only if the other team has had all their retinas blown out with a nail gun.
Now imagine a team, who pays little attention to shooting straight, in other words, these guys can hit jack-sh!t, the game would maybe last longer than the previous one but eventually every team who played like this would get their ass fedex’d to them for obvious reasons.
Basically the other team would just whittle them down as the game progressed.
So in using another couple of Einsteinian thought experiments we have established what the true kings of paintball skills are, not communication, not teamwork but tightness and the ability to shoot straight.
I am not saying we should not have a comms package; teams need one for God’s sake but let’s get things in perspective.
It would take about five minutes to work out some sort of coded package that more than takes care of what would be needed in a game of paintball.
You need a head count for both sides, a couple of coded words for different situations and that’s about it.
Any more than that and it start to gets confusing and is ultimately counter-productive anyway.
As for teamwork or rather practicing it?
Bullsh!t, bullsh!t, bullsh!t!!!!!!
The game as it now stands, determines that players who have gained enough experience and skill at the pro level, if put together in a team, have the ability to produce, on the day, the necessary degree of teamwork to win games.
We all play off one another at some, if not all stages of the game.
Your pal shoots an opposite line man and it enables you to make a move or shoot another angle, your team-mate calls for suppressive fire as he moves, you give it,
you see your left flank blowing a tape; you move with them or shoot cover.
All of these are examples of teamwork and are generally achieved by players becoming experienced at what they do and the way they do it.
Teamwork is an emergent property of playing together over a protracted period of time together ... teamwork is an organic concept, adapting and evolving game after game.
To try and train teamwork really is like chasing shadows ...
The real good part of all this, the number one and number two most important parts of our game, that of playing tight and shooting accurately are easily trained and I am gonna do a vid of just how to snap shoot correctly.
It was developed in 2003 and has never and will never be bettered ...
I am gonna ask Ledz to send me down some gear and I’ll shoot it some time over the next week or so .. I might even do it at the next CPPS or NSPL if I can get there.
I will tell you one thing about this snap-shot, it transformed all of the Nexus players in 2003 once they had nailed it; it took a bit of getting used to but once they had, it turned them all into killing machines and was one of the main reasons why those original guys went from chumps to champs [uk] within a few months.
Laterz mortalz
Robbo
