Uk National Paintball league

[Buddha 3]

ok i havent read the whole of this post so if anyone has thought of this and said it im sorry and agree with that person 100% ok here my idea.... paintball is a growing sport growing so much it should be hitting the olympics soon... and we are a country need a frickin decent team to represent us, so here my idea we have trials to find the best ten players from each county.A coach is assigned to each area of the country to pick these players obviusly someone with a paintball back ground. Then we have a league where all the countys play eachother. so that when it does come to qualifying for the olympics we will be prepared because the best in the country would have allready been playing with eachother and against eachother. obviusly the team representing the UK would be selected by taking the best players from each county to trials then picking from there. i dont know just an idea really what do you guys think?

Great! We'll have a good team for the Olympics. Yay!
What does that have to do with anything said in this thread though?

 

[Biscuit]

just to get them to agree to a single format, for all three leagues would be a massive step forward and they could still run independent of each other.if you look at other sports they run lots of sunday type leagues run by different people but they all sing from the same rulebook,that would probable be the best we could hope for at the present time

 

[Robbo]

just to get them to agree to a single format, for all three leagues would be a massive step forward .................:

We won't even be able to achieve that let alone a unified UK league ... all the rest is sixth form idealism......

 

[Tricky]

Mikey, this is boring now, can you just shut up and bugger off to Denmark

 

[Paontball Mad]

but as the great mod said above trying to make out that he has got this he was a bit wrong.

The last paragraph i thought was a bit risky and stupid unless i read it wrong. Im sure a sport like cricket in the first 20odd years in its life had regional mini competitions. Because it was a small sport and not that many played which inturn doesnt allow you to have enough teams to make a proper league. Take Dorset for an example what temas could we have riptide, Bliztgrieg and bridport synapse theres one more i think but ive forgoten so 4 teams surely isnt enough to make a mini league out off. Yes in 10 years time this might be the best thing to do and will give the growth of paintball i massive jump. But no way will this be achivable let alone worth while in the state Uk ball is in. So i have to say that what you siad there was a crazy idea as is at the moment! We need to keep the 3main leagues and let them feed into the higher UK league then into the Milliniums, and thne world domination!!!

cheers Tim
will edit later for mistakes as ive g2g

 

[Raffles]

Ok raff, i have met at got along with you in the past but your talking sh!t, ...

Love you too mate .

Actually, I am getting quite worried here. It looks like Robbo and I are actually agreeing on something .

Anyway Mikey, I know you have the best intentions - but I really do think you haven't done your homework here (the fact that you don't have Russell Smith's - or Andy Hatton's - contact number proves this. Try www.thepaintballassociation.biz ).

One rulebook to guide them all is a great idea - then at least the players and ref's would know which game they were playing/marshalling. But, do we all go for the Millennium rules and let the Millennium 'board' decide how we play? Even they can't decide amongst themselves half the time . But, this would be something along the lines of FIFA and/or UEFA (sp?) I suppose.

I don't think that trying to get Syd, Wendy and Hatts (for he is the Chairman of the PA - not Russ) to agree a unified league is the answer (well, not in the real world).

The 'real' way forward is to have a 'Millennium National UK Paintball League (MN[UK]PL)'. But who would chair it? Who would be treasurer? Who would pay for the initial setup (OK - I did over-egg it a lot before - but start-up costs will run in to thousands - just ask Markie)?

Another issue - not yet discussed - is where would you hold each 'leg'? Would you have designated fields dotted around the country or one single one in Manchester ?

As travelling seems a major concern (bar a few) - then why not have seperate divisions for each country? Then have the winners of each country play each other in a Grand Finale?

I am not trying to crap on your idea Mikey - just trying to point out some of the major pitfalls.

Catch me on MSN (or phone) and we can talk about it better.

 

[Paontball Mad]

Mikey, this is boring now, can you just shut up and bugger off to Denmark

hes there already i thought, way dont u try it over there if it works we will do it over here

 

[Buddha 3]

but as the great mod said above trying to make out that he has got this he was a bit wrong.

The last paragraph i thought was a bit risky and stupid unless i read it wrong. Im sure a sport like cricket in the first 20odd years in its life had regional mini competitions. Because it was a small sport and not that many played which inturn doesnt allow you to have enough teams to make a proper league. Take Dorset for an example what temas could we have riptide, Bliztgrieg and bridport synapse theres one more i think but ive forgoten so 4 teams surely isnt enough to make a mini league out off. Yes in 10 years time this might be the best thing to do and will give the growth of paintball i massive jump. But no way will this be achivable let alone worth while in the state Uk ball is in. So i have to say that what you siad there was a crazy idea as is at the moment! We need to keep the 3main leagues and let them feed into the higher UK league then into the Milliniums, and thne world domination!!!

cheers Tim
will edit later for mistakes as ive g2g

Nothing wrong in what I said. Regional is a very flexible concept. A region could be bigger than just Dorset. Could be just North/South, or North/South/East/West. There's plenty of possibilities. All you need is anywhere from 6 to 10 teams per region. Naturally, regions with a high density of paintballers would be smaller. London could be a region on its own, whereas Wales in its entirety could be another.

Anyway, it's all just theorizing. It ain't gonna happen for a looooooong time.

As far as last paragraphs being wrong go, yours couldn't be further off the mark. If you have three leagues feeding into a higher league, as you suggest, that's gonna go tits up if those feeder leagues do not have a unified set of rules. Why would you wanna have feeder leagues that play 5 man for a 7 man league? Makes no sense. Besides, the Millennium will not accept that. They are happy to take the money off of anybody that is willing to pay, rather than just those that qualify.

 

[Tricky]

hes there already i thought, way dont u try it over there if it works we will do it over here

I hope he's not as I'm meant to flying with him tomorow Something you wanna tell me Mikey?

 

[Russell Smith]

I should probably not have replied to this post because it’s a subject that is quite close to my chest and also one that can upset a few people if I am not very careful on how I put things over, but here goes anyhow.
The concept of a national league is one that has been attempted on many occasions throughout the history of paintball in the UK but in essence all they (the various people behind the endeavours at the time) wanted to accomplish was the generation of more profit from a source that believed they was paying out their hard earned to help create paintball as a sport.
The truth is nobody had ever checked out the actual requirements that MUST be in place before you can even try and go down the route of getting it recognised as a sport until the PA (or should I say the founders off) had a meeting with the sports council to verify all sorts of information we had amassed from other so called informed sources.
Unfortunately it became apparent that any number of millennium, PSP, or NPPL held in the UK would never be able to meet the criteria on so many levels it was our belief that the only way to do it was to do it ourselves in close collaboration and guidance from the sports council itself.
To that end the Paintball Association was created, it had to be something new because nothing in the country at that time could meet what the Sports Council demanded.
The first event that was attempted the Paintball Association Cup attracted enough media interest (after Gillie Hatton spent weeks on the phone to every newspaper in the country) to get William Hill to take bets on the event, we also found out that media interest does not translate into press coverage, but at least paintball was on mainstream TV for a few seconds when John Dolan shot Jonathan Ross on “I think it’s all over” a sports quiz programme on BBC1 and the results of the event published in the sports section of the News of the Word newspaper.
We thought that was a decent beginning and maybe if we took the concept and made it into a league it could help our endeavour, so the Paintball Association National League was created.
The trouble is when someone who is effectively new to the organiser side of it, the current group of organisers look at their own potential reduction in income and not the bigger picture and because of that do not offer there own support to the attempt to make Paintball into a recognised sport in the UK, and with hindsight I understand their concerns because if the boot was on the other foot I would have shared them.
Don’t get me wrong we had support in other ways from Syd Pelling from the South West League because he played at our events, and Wendy from the masters supported us and even offered to help with the reffing on a few occasions. We had in that first year 40 teams and a waiting list of teams who wanted to play was drawn up, in the second year we had 55 teams wanting to participate but we had to reduce the number to 44 because we could not administrate any more than that in only one day.
We have a post event meeting after every round to analyse any concerns that had become apparent, and at one of those meting we was also discussing some research we had carried out on the number of active players in the UK and we realised we could be having a negative input on UK paintball when all we wanted to do was help it.
You see if we carried out the plans we had made to let everyone who applied play the events we would adversely influence the other leagues because the player base would have to choose what events to participate in, and that itself could create a problem for paintball because if they chose to play the PA the local leagues could be in the position that it would not be financially beneficial to run the events for the organisers and without local leagues paintball as an organised sport would never get its player base.
We took the decision to reduce the number of teams we wanted to offer places to try and stop our concerns becoming a reality, but some damage had been done, not to the player base but to how the organisers and others had started to view the PA.
Instead of being the good guys as I wanted to think of ourselves (and I still do) we started to hear that people who knew better was beginning to tell people down right lies about what our intention was.
People who asked us what was happening was told the truth but the ones that didn’t talk to us was told on some occasions complete and utter bull**** from sources that should know better.
We still run the league to accomplish the same thing wanted to do from its original conception and that is to help paintball at all levels realise it’s true potential and that brings me back to the first post in this thread when it was asked if we could get a national league in this country.
We could get together (the organisers group) and have done in the past, we all have each others telephone numbers, and we even have a private web forum for us to share information with each other.
But I think what you are asking for is an end of season event where you get the winners from all the leagues in the UK to have a play off for bragging rights for a couple of weeks, if you think that would help paintball I am afraid you are wrong it would just be another recreational tournament style event.
If you want a national league check out the PA national league, the clue is in the title……

Happy New Year


Russ