2300 AD? To go mainstreem?
Hmmm,
I think that Paintball will always suffer from the huge complication required to play; I'll explain, coz that probably makes no sense whatsoever...:
Kit required to play football at top level:
Stadium, balls, referee, linesmen, pitch, goals, players each with boots and shirts etc.
Kit to play football in the garden with your mates:
Ball, two jumpers, but of flat(ish) ground 2+ people: cost £5 for the ball
Kit required to play Paintball at top level:
Staduim, air-ball field, balls, marshals, air, 10 (or 14 or 20) people each with their own markers, masks, battle-pack, hopper, air system, shirts... (the list goes on)
Kit required to play paitnball in the garden with your mates:
Almost as much! Cost, £200(?)each
Kids can't just decide to go out and play paintball, they need to organise a day, or already own a whole load of kit. Most poeple have no idea what a paintball game looks like, let alone have played.
So my prediction is that Piantball will never be anywhere near as big as Football. For paintball to become more popular and mainstream... that may happen or it may not.
Officially becoming a sport, becoming an olympic event and all these things are important sure, but they won't magically make paintball a mainstream sport that is as big as say Rugby or Hockey; think of all the minority sports that are Olympic events, how many of them get ANY coverage other than during the Olympic games (think curling... and that only got so much coverage on UK TV because we stood a chance of doing well) who has ever been to an Archery tournament? Or pistol shooting?
If paintball is to become bigger then it needs to recruit more people, make it cheaper to take up, advertise for example in a mainstream magazine (FHM?) this kinda thing won't really be possible unless paintball becomes more organised within the industry, because that takes money. Maybe with the reformation of Skirmish this kind of thing might be possible. After all after "X-Fire, my favourite TV progam
they say "contact a registered paintball site" not "Contact us for a paitnball site near you".
As long as this post is... just one thing to add:
Do we really want paintball to become huge? The paintball community is pretty small, but with it is (on the whole) friendly, to be honest I have found that I am very at home with the community, and when I stray outside (I guested for a team playing an event that not many teams I knew played) the ethos was a bit different and I wasn't surrounded by familiar faces in the same way.
So in short, paintball is small, but is that neccesarily a bad thing?
Richard
