Right, as promised, here goes...
The problem Pete describes is very similar to Holland, albeit that here it happens on a smaller scale, since we are after all a smaller country.
To the vast majority of the people paintball is something you do as a stagdo, or with your collegues or whatever. Basically just for ****s and giggles.
Years and years ago, one site owner (one of the first in Holland) had the brains to start selling paintball equipment, besides running his site. He sold paint and guns to some other people who run sites too. But he also started selling high end markers (I'm talking about the days when a VM68 was considered cool....). Figuring it makes no sense to be selling that type of marker when there is no customer base for them, he opened up his own site on sundays to all the people that had their own stuff. You only paid a small fee, bought a box of paint and started blasting fools.
Things have progressed dramatically since then.
In Holland we have plenty of run of the mill sites, where people come, pay money to pretend to be Chuck Norris for a day and go home again. These people, mostly, had a good day, but are none the wiser about paintball's other sides. Sure, some of these sites get return customers, but when somebody comes to play more than twice a year, it's a lot...
However, the guy that first opened up his site to people with their own gear (the same guy who brought your the DMA's by the way), and a very few other site owners, have stepped things up a notch. He now runs a huge site, with a good number of fields, all with their own theme. Besides these themed fields, he also has official tournament Sup'Air fields.
People can become members of the local paintballclub, and pretty much practice when they want. They also get massive discounts on paint and such. This all takes place alongside the rental customers, who get to see the other side of paintball. There is interaction between the rental customers and the walk-ons/team players, thereby promoting the other side of the game. This leads to more and more people getting interested in the game, which in turn leads to more people joing the club, which leads to more people playing the game, which leads to more people buying the gear, which leads to happy people playing paintball, which leads to a happy site/shop owner.
Sure, it requires an investment, both in time and money, but in the end you get people that play the game a lot more often, who may not spend as much money per head per paintball session as the rentals do, but over a year they spend a ****load more. Besides that, they don't interfere with the ability to take the revenue from the rentals either (although this is largely down to the fact that the site is big enough to accomodate them both, not every site owner may be so lucky).
The above example also makes it painfully obvious what Pete means by people that just want to play paintball.
The regulars that visit the site can be split into two different groups: The tourney ballers, and the woodsballers. Guess which group is the largest...
There is a large group of people out there that play paintball, but prefer to crawl around trees rather than big inflatable cushions. These people will play competitions if they don't have any other options, but given half a chance will disappear into the woods and get face down in the dirt.
Sure, these guys don't take the competition thing very serious, but they do spend serious money on their equipment. They shoot Angels too if their wallets allow it. If these guys do not get the chance to play their own game and get lumped in with the tourney ballers, this will give a wrong picture of the tourney scene. Also it will lead to a higher rate of people dropping out of the game, because they are not playing the way they really want to.
A totally different problem that I see, is the way the whole team thing is approached. Basically, any group of people can just sit down and say "right, now we are a paintball team!". Just add a name and hey presto!
If you are however serious about playing paintball in a competitive environment, you need much more than 5-7 people (depending on the format that you intend to play).
You need commitment. You need extra players.
Sure, everybody will say they're comitted to the team, but won't show up for every practice. There may be good reasons to do so, but that's irrelevant.
In order to cope with this, at first there needs to be a clear hierarchy within the team. You need a coach/manager. Somebody that is not afraid to be impopular. If you intend to play M5, I'd say you need a roster of at least 10 people. That's twice the number of people that'll take the field...
That way, the manager can keep track of who shows up for training sessions, and the players that just don't put in the effort (for whatever reasobn, financial, personal or otherwise) get benched. Nowadays it's still a case of "well, we'll let him play, even though he hasn't really been to practice, but we need him to fill out the numbers". That just won't cut it.
If your team consists of less then ten names, consider a merger with a team in your area suffering from the same thing. You should have been one team to begin with, because your paintball demographic obviously isn't big enough to sustain two teams.
Unless you are willing to do things like this, you are not taking things seriously and you have rightfully not entered your team in the CC. You are just another rec player. Which is fine, but don't try to kid yourself and the rest of the world by maintaining you are a tournament team...
I can go on and on about this, but I'll save that for another time.
I'm spending around 350 pounds to go to CC including flight, accomodation, paint (estimate, of course) and entry fee, and I am going from Spain (it should be a little more expensive than going from the UK...) 