KOHI said:
so were does that leave us and what steps do we take?
we are stuck in a ever decreasing whirl pool if the sites don't change and we cant do anything to change that.
KOHI....at last......you now appreciate the problem
As for some of the other comments made, I have mentioned before a few months ago, if we can't rely on our site owners to promote tourney ball then obviously something else has to be done.
Now I don't wanna tar everybody with the same brush here because there are some guys out there like Sid the Jock, Russell Steele from Shockwave, Dave Stewart at Dartford 7's and Warren down in Ashford who have a profound belief in tourney ball and are doing something about it but for us as a nation, these guys ain't nowhere near enough.
But let me tell you something here because it's hugely important and MUST be understood if we are to get a real handle on this problem.
Russell Steele and Sid have conventional Paintball sites in that they run woodland games and any promo they do with regard to tourney based (or Sup Air) is done on the back of their existing business.
Dave is going it alone in this sense because he has no woodland to fall back on and so his business lives or dies on tourney ballers attendance.
Now for Dave at Dartford 7's it is obviously more critical the UK market is sufficiently buoyant in terms of tourney players (or aspiring tourney players).
His positioning next to the M25 is also crucial because it immediately taps into all the guys around the M25 and beyond and yet we still see a huge swathe of people not bothering to get their asses down there.
The important point here is this, since nobody is marketing tourney ball then we are pretty much providing a service to those already converted.
And if what I say is true that our tourney base is made up of mainly displaced recballers who haven't got a place to play, then it's hardly surprising sites like Dave's aren't gonna be rammed full every week, as they should be.
And I am saying these type sites should be busy because for the amount of teams we got around here on the M25, and with Dave's site being the only one dedicated to tourney ballers and it's position, then he should be overflowing every weekend.
The reason why it ain't is because, yes we have ballers around the M25 and yes there are more than enough to ram his site every weekend but no, they haven't got the correct mindset to wanna improve as ballers because these guys ain't really tourney ballers, they are rec players.
The serious ballers do go to Russel's site, do go to Warren's site and Dave's but we just haven't got the right demographic within our tourney base to make these sites busy all of the time.
FFS guys, SC village is rammed full every weekend in LA and this is because the youth over there has been switched on to tourney play by marketing, TV etc and even Germany has shown the rest of Europe how to go about marketing Paintball to the public.
The problem disappears when we got some people who realise the true worth of tourney ball and then go market that instead of what we see in malls all over the UK, some dodgy selling practices marketing Rambo ball.
If we had a similar marketing strategy whereby our shopping malls had the Dynasty type action DVDs playing, and the whole focus of that strategy pointed toward Tourney ball, this would then create sufficient interest in the young demographic leading to an influx of players that inevitably leads onto an increased tourney team base.
What's more important here is to note that the new demographic created here would reflect a higher ratio of competitive ballers as against what it is now with displaced recballers outnumbering the competitive demographic.
Once this marketing strategy has been adopted, it wouldn't be long before the tourney, Sup Air sites would be bulging thus creating the marketing incentive for sites to expand their facilities into tourney.
At the moment we are asking site owners to invest in a market that they see isn't there, and for the most part it isn't.
Real businessmen create that market and as we know most of our site owners ain't real businessmen and unless it's handed out on a plate to them they ain't even gonna think of doing a damned thing.
All we need is somebody like that Delta Force mob to believe in tourney ball and go market the hell out of it.
