I have seen a lot of friends drop out of the UK tourny scene in the last 18 months, and it is looking increasingly likely that I will too this year. I spend a lot of time wondering why people do not seem to WANT to play tournaments.
One issue I believe is this :-
Punter days mean appox 10 x 15 min games played in a day = 150mins 'balling.
Modern Supair Tourny 8 games x 1.5 min games = 12mins 'balling.
The thought of travelling hours, spending all day waiting around (typically in crappy weather) to spend £75 on a day's play, for a total of maybe 12 minutes spent shooting your gun (if you play every game) - why the hell DO we do it ! And how can you sell that to somebody enjoying playing in the woods.
If you win - then great - the buzz is worth the input. If you don't win, only a very small percentage of people are going to keep this up before finding something better to do on their sundays - like playing on their xbox.
Paintball tournaments need to be more fun for the input (be it travelling time, total cost etc). I cannot say I get terribly excited anymore rolling up to see this month's layout of the same bouncy bunkers, ... unlike going to play at Phil Ham's old place near Detling, with Hyperball, Arenaball, the bale field and the mound field, ... just the fact that it had 4 different field types added some craziness and variety (and more fun ?) to the proceedings.
I guess as the sport has successfully 'progressed' into a more competition based experience, fun will always have been the victim. It's good for the die-hard tournament fanatics, but we won't ever be successful selling this to the masses; no more than if we tried to encourage more people to take up proffesional golf, tennis, squash etc etc.
One issue I believe is this :-
Punter days mean appox 10 x 15 min games played in a day = 150mins 'balling.
Modern Supair Tourny 8 games x 1.5 min games = 12mins 'balling.
The thought of travelling hours, spending all day waiting around (typically in crappy weather) to spend £75 on a day's play, for a total of maybe 12 minutes spent shooting your gun (if you play every game) - why the hell DO we do it ! And how can you sell that to somebody enjoying playing in the woods.
If you win - then great - the buzz is worth the input. If you don't win, only a very small percentage of people are going to keep this up before finding something better to do on their sundays - like playing on their xbox.
Paintball tournaments need to be more fun for the input (be it travelling time, total cost etc). I cannot say I get terribly excited anymore rolling up to see this month's layout of the same bouncy bunkers, ... unlike going to play at Phil Ham's old place near Detling, with Hyperball, Arenaball, the bale field and the mound field, ... just the fact that it had 4 different field types added some craziness and variety (and more fun ?) to the proceedings.
I guess as the sport has successfully 'progressed' into a more competition based experience, fun will always have been the victim. It's good for the die-hard tournament fanatics, but we won't ever be successful selling this to the masses; no more than if we tried to encourage more people to take up proffesional golf, tennis, squash etc etc.
