1) No different from the current set up....and that's the problem. People won't be motivated if they get to "hang with the stars".
2) Sigh..... why, oh why.... Why do people keep thinking up ways to improve on paintball the product? There is not much wrong with it. Sure there is room for improvement, but that's not what's keeping you guys back. The problem is people not making the transition from rental to walk on to tournament. It's got f*ck all to do with who sponsors what...
I think I'm gonna try to leave this discussion alone. No offense meant, but people think in ways that have nothing at all to do with the problem and somehow refuse to see the real problems. And no matter how many people point at the rather obvious problems and solutions, everybody just goes "yeah but, no but, TV.... spectators.... sponsors...."
Last thing I'll say is rental ---> walk on ---> tournament. Don't need any sponsors, TV or spectators for that.
Bud, I tell ya what makes me laugh, as I documented before on here, the likes of Dave Youngblood (Dye) - Avery (NPS) - Billy Ceranski (PMI) all highlighted the problem we face by telling me it was our average site owner who was to blame.
Now these three guys KNOW what they are talking about, I too, have explained the lineage of responsibility and have focused on our site owners and yet...and yet the only guys who defend our site owners ?
Yeh you guessed it....our site owners
We do have some site owners who invest in the right areas, people like big Syd (Scotland), and also little Sid (SW Region), Russ Steele and I also think Chuck (Colchester).
Now the reason I mention these is because they have existing woodland site businesses and they have chosen to extend their business toward promoting tourney ball, not exclusively obviously but they have expanded the range of products on offer to their customer base.
What Buddha says is right, this is one way to increase our tourney base (buy increasing sites who push walk on's) but I have also suggested (many times before) that we try to push tourney ball as the front end marketing of paintball.
I ain't gonna go over this again but I 100% believe that if we funded a similar type operation that Delta Force employ to market their product (Mall and city centre promotions) then if we did the same with tourney ball, we would revolutionize our game relatively overnight.
...but all the time we have the particular demographic of site owners that we boast, then we got little chance; they are of limited imagination, limited business acumen and more damningly, limited of intellect.
You can't polish turds !!!!!
And the same goes for our present playing tourney base of players - just look at these boards if you need any proof of abject lethargy having infected what seems like our entire tourney population.
Soo many of them post things up on these boards that contradicts what they actually do.
It's not really what people say, people bullsh!t all the time, it's what people actually do that counts in this world and we have far too many talkers in UK paintball and nowhere near enough do'ers.
Sometimes I get kinda sick at seeing a lot of these guys on here believing that if you call each other 'dude' you are a proballer.
Bejeeeeezus - the truth of the matter?
How many real proballers we got???
If you wanna know, then don't go looking at the Millennium to help ya - you gotta look at the NXL teams and the NPPL teams, these are the pros, the real pros.
And for all the bollocks and posturing and 'dudes you hear on here, how many we got out of ALL the ballers over here?
Well, at the moment, I can only think of Dan Maskell who plays (I don't know if he still does) for the Legion.
I might be wrong in thinking he's our only rep but I can't think of any more.
Now trust me on this next point as I had this argument with one of my ex players, if ANY player was good enough to play in either the NXL and or NPPL, then they would be....
If Rich Telford from XSV thought you were good enough then he would be asking you to join, it's as easy as that.
Well, I spoke to Rich the other night, and trust me, he ain't sending no offers across the Atlantic just yet.
We fukkin suk coz we got site owners (our average site owner) who ain't worth sh!t, we got a tourney player base more intent on 'having a laff' and the poor *******s like Kelly's and Shock who actually do put in some real work have to fly the flag for all of us......
A lot of the Shock guys ain't getting no younger (no disrespect meant) and so we (and they) should be breeding that young buck to filter through and that's where we hit another problem.
On top of that, we haven't got the pedigree or depth of coach in this country, no frikkin way.
We got guys who think they understand the game and others who go thru the motions of coaching but I'm afraid if I said we have less than a handful then I ain't exaggerating.
This in itself isn't as big a problem as it sounds because teams can make great improvements just by picking stuff from tourneys, the net or PGi etc but to get to that next level, a coach who knows what he's doing is essential.
