OK, we'll answerin reverse order, heh
I've seen all of the pro teams, players bounce around from pro team to pro team fairly frequently (or at least the "upper echelon" of teams if you count top ams), and the number of pro teams is small. They are also, by definition, PRO teams, i.e., the best.
College teams are different. For starters, there's a lot more of them. If you play college, you only have ONE team option - the team at your school. And they run a much wider varience in skill levels. I highly doubt you'll see a pro team of people who have never played a tournament before, but there are plenty of teams at college events who are playing their first tournament. We target players like that.
But there are also teams at college tournaments made up of people who have been practicing together once or twice a week on the same team for 3 years, against and being coached by better teams. These guys are good. I'm not going to say they're pros, but they arn't slouches.
Anyway, I can say most pro teams are more or less the same while college teams are not because it's true - they're two entirely different animals.
As for why we need a college league, it's a legiitmizer, and its a much better interface to the public. When you're looking for those advertising dollars, teams peolpe give a **** about trump better play any day of the week, because frankly, if you're not a tournament paintball player (and they are *NOT* the market) you can't tell the difference between a college team and a pro team skill wise. But you can tell the difference between a team from a college you recognize and a team you've never heard of before. When you get down to it, no one gives a **** about Dynasty or Avalanche or any other pro team outside of a very small circle of tournament paintball players. Not to say anyone really cares aout college paintball teams either, but it's much easier to get them to care.
This important thing to keep in mind is this: The question someone who is thinking about dumping piles of money into paintball is going to ask is "How is this going to enable me to sell more product?" When that advertiser is trying to sell their products to 10-17 year old kids, are they going to feel better about parental response when they're sponsoring 25-35 year old men on a team called "Ground Zero" running around shooting each other, or are they going to want to sponsor 17-23 year old students from Florida State University? Yes, we know those are virtually the same thing, but to the paintball uninformed, one is one hell of a lot more palatable than the other.
Being able to say you have an organized college league of teams that are college-sanctioned is a BIG positive when you're trying to argue that you actually have a sport. It works on TV execs, it works on advertisers, and it works on legislators. The basic theory is that if we can convice a bunch of colleges that we're a sport (i.e., someone other than us), there's a good chance we actually are.
And in the long term, the "athletic advancement" path is HS->College->Pro. For the very simple reason that it's cheaper to create athletes that way.
The other thing we have going for us is rec players don't hate us. That's 90% of the paintball market. Usually never more than a third of a college club plays tournaments, the rest are all rec players. Rec players and tournament players in the same organization liking each other, imagine that. Too much of tournament paintball has forgotten where the money comes from.
- Chris
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