When you said the NPPL loses money on every event, you meant the 3 events this year only...
I was talking about this year - that would seem to be the most relevant. But if you want to go for accuracy, you can extend that back to Tampa last year, and any event in the foreseeable future absent DRASTIC change that may or may not be successful.
When you said 'entry level', you meant entry tournament level, not entry national event level (which is, I think, the page that everyone else was on).
Given that it was in reference to dumping XPSL being a bad idea, I thought it was pretty clear that we were talking about tournament paintball.
When you said 'Nothing that costs $200+ per person in entry fees is 'entry level', you meant non-mainline sports only...
Oh no, I meant everything.
Now, I've grown to like and respect you Chris, as I hope you know, but do you see where I'm coming from with this? The same sweeping inaccurate generalisations that used to drive me crazy, are still driving me crazy, because to ignore them is to allow people to accept them as truth.
Generalizations are just that. While there MAY be some sports out there where $200 entry is entry level, they would be, by far, the exception. Sports where $200/event is NOT entry level:
Baseball
Soccer
Basketball
Swimming
or pretty much ANY other sport with scholastic competition. But even traveling soccer isn't $200/person.
I know from experience that entry-level competitive skiing, for example, is free or close to it (with the price of a lift ticket).
You picked golf and fishing - I'm not conceding that this is the case, but I don't know enough about golf or fishing to know for sure. I suspect that there are plenty of golf and fishing tournaments out there that are NOT $200 in entry, and I suspect that most people playing their first tournaments don't pay that much (also, re: golf, that $200 also includes green fees that may, by themselves, be $100+).
Golf and fishing are also *INDIVIDUAL* sports, which are different for another reason: You don't need to be on a team to play. You can go fish and golf on your own. It's pretty hard to play paintball without a team to play against, which pushes the entry-level down. People will pay to play a team-sport tournament just so they can have organized competition; in individual sports, there's not as much reason to pay for a competition unless you're wanting to compete for prizes, which pushes the entry-level cost up.
Regardless, like most sports, $200/person isn't entry level for paintball tournaments.