Are there any professional sales-people in the house?
As it happens I am, I was headhunted into a corp. sales job a little while back and have been working with large banks, legal firms etc since.
If you are looking at this as a way to push uk paintball forward I am extremely happy to help. However you mentioned trying to open this up to "joe public", which from what I have seen seems to be sensible. As Robbo has brought up before places like Germany ONLY play tourny ball and this has lead to some good teams coming out of there recently aswell as things like the X5 tournaments.
In the future if we want UK balling to progress we need to be looking at key selling points for our sport, why do people not want to play paintball over football, rugby, etc etc. The obvious answer would be the stigma of those that have played rec ball before seeing paintball as a very expensive sport aswell as the large initial outlay on kit for those that try to start . Therefore we need some big benefit to overcome this hurdle. This being the huge excitement, some form of primitive love of war and boys toys.
Firstly we need a cheap way of introducing people to the sport. This could be done in a number of ways, the obvious suggestion would be to have better site kit (especially colourful jerseys NOT camos), then a nice clean safe airball field with plenty of room for spectators (mostly parents probably), combined with £30 a box is certain to go down a treat. The big problem with this would be the initial outlay on the site owner, new guns, hoppers, kit, etc. Also adding things like tourny ball DVDs on a loop in the reception area also helps boost the appearence of paintball as a sport rather than wanna be rambo.
What I think would be a better solution would be some form of summer camp type thing. Working with schools, or perhaps cadet schemes, get them to sign up to a month long course or so, where they play a few times a week for a month learning from suitable people while also playing lots. You would not get them all day everyday as throwing them in the deepend with tourny ball will not give good results, at least to start with. Then when we can work with them (i.e. tell them what tourny ball is all about) and they get a huge adrenaline dump and it is relatively cheap, in comparison to rec ball, then they can go do whatever and hopefully spread the word. Then depending on how much you might charge for all this they could perhaps go home at the end of the course with a decent basic knowledge and perhaps some basic kit to get further into it i.e. goggles, jersey, maybe marker setup again depending on cost.
Other things that need to be considered, general awareness of the sport, poster campaigns when local events are on ESPECIALLY showcase ones like Campaign Cup. When I went this year all I saw was direction things with Millennium in big letters on them, which is totally meaningless to mr. bloggs.
Those were just suggestions there are probably quite a few ways this could be done but the key point is that we need to get tournament paintball to be seen differently to rec ball, like American football and football.
Once this sort of initiative has some weight behind it, there will be enough tournament players to be able to form a players union and more importantly a specific tourny ball council ( perhaps a branch of the UKPSF or maybe a totally seperate unit). Then we can start looking at rules, leagues, etc etc.
Lets get some ideas bubbling with this and between us maybe we can do something to turn tournament paintball into the sport it deserves to be.
