Originally posted by Stan
What sort of backing do the Ruskies have then: i'm after facts and figures not general hearsay...
Robbo - outside the team you seem to know the most about them are you in a position to divulge information?
For example:
Budget?
Weekly paint consumption?
What support staff do they have:
strength and conditioning?
psych?
nutritionist?
Do they have paintball coaching or is this Sergei's role?
How comprehensive is their training programme?
How many sessions per day,
how much is pure "game time",
how much is drills,
how much is fitness or is that down to the individual,
etc?
How big is their rosta?
If players are paid "full time" what is their average wage?
Do they all live together?
Stuff like that
Some of the details you ask for, I'm not sure Sergey would want divulging but put it this way, Sergey looks at training and outfitting his paintball team the same way as he look at operating his bank.
He wants to understand all the factors that affect it, both negative and positive, he will look to what makes it leaner, what makes it perform better and so on.
Whatever it takes for him to achieve this, he will do.
At the moment not all of the roster are dedicated pros, just over half is, for those who are, they are paid a wage to live on and given free accommodation.
They are trained five days a week which includes extensive fitness training with programs developed by two coaches one of whom was an Olympic coach and tailored the programs for paintball.
The full time pros it would seem are training more extensively than full time soccer pros.
The significant resources behind the Legion are threefold, Sergey, industry and intellectual.
Sergey owns a bank, nuff said !
The industry in the form of Gino and NPS back the RL and I would presume their recent result in the US may well predispose a better deal to be done across the industry board
The intellectual resource is astounding, they have guys who really understand the dynamics of paintball which means understanding all that makes good a specific technique as well as understanding just how far you can push the tactical side of the game into what is predominantly a technical game and lastly they have their coaches designing training programs tailored for their players.
It's the complete outfit and their success gives me personally an enormous amount of relief and pleasure because from the very start of their time in this cynical circuit of ours, they attempted at all times to play fair under what sometimes seemed insane accusations of microphones and radios being used and now, all that aisde, they have proven to everybody they are truly one of the best and fairest teams in the world.
