After reading the majority of the posts that were in response to my initial post commenting upon the dire state of UK Paintball, I gotta say, I feel slightly more optimistic (which is ironic) about what lies ahead. … only slightly mind you.
The reason for this optimism is because I honestly believed I was gonna come in for some real heavy flak for suggesting we as paintballers (the majority) were just not the right sort of person (or mindset) to allow ambition and aspiration to flourish in our tournament scene.
Coz let’s face it, who the hell likes somebody telling them they ain’t got what it takes, I certainly wouldn’t even if it was the truth ..and as we all have to acknowledge now, it is undoubtedly the truth.
It’s hard to deny facts, however patriotic or however much we harbour a misplaced pride in our performances and abilities but our showings in the Millennium exposed for us all to see, the downward spiral we had allowed to take grip…in the end, there was no argument, we had to face up to it.
As for answers?
Well, if I didn’t have any, I wouldn’t have started the thread, it would have been a pointless exercise on my part just to open up a can of worms like that and attract what I believed would end up in a hate fest directed against me for daring to criticize our tournament team base.
As soon as I realized what the real problem was, in that we had a displaced recball market residing in our tournament scene, it immediately told me the nature of the real problem and that as I said, was one of the wrong demographic, in other words, the type of person we have playing in our tournaments.
In essence, because we have no real recball (walk-on) scene over here, it displaces those people who would normally want to play rec over to tournament ball because this is the only place they can play ball and not have to play rental prices.
Once we accept this displacement it helps us understand why we do not generate teams of sufficient quality because tournament teams should be made up of players who are competitive and aspire to improve etc but as we now know this is not the case.
Occasional players, guys who just enjoy playing and do not posses that truly competitive edge end up playing in our tourney circuit for the reasons already mentioned.
If we are trying to emulate other countries in producing quality teams then we are trying to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.. it ain’t happening dude, leastwise not from our tourney scene demographic.
We in no way can criticize the guys who do make up our tourney scene because they are playing to enjoy the game and at that level they are hugely successful in achieving what they want and just because some of us want to improve paintball in qualitative terms doesn’t make me or anybody else ‘right’, leastwise to criticize them.
It’s just we have differing criteria for playing, that’s all.
Good luck to the majority of players over here is what I say because these guys can satisfy their needs for playing paintball just by picking up their gear bags and turning out, for other more driven people, it’s a lot harder but in my opinion, a lot more rewarding.
That’s another story though.
To put this situation right we have to do the following ;-
a) Identify and acknowledge our problem (which thankfully we have done now).
b) We need to showcase tournament paintball to rentals.
c) We need to increase the number of walk on venues.
We need to expose the flashy side of tourney ball to the young and there is no better way of doing this than to have some of those vids or dvd’s or whatever playing on some sort of monitor down the local site.
As I remarked in another post, you put that side of our sport in front of a bunch of young guys then their jaws drop.
This ain’t no bull****, I have seen it so many times, I have seen rental guys lined up watching my Nexus guys train against Shockwave or Jags. They look on in awe at the diving, bunkering, markers and so on and so on…….at a base level this game as played in ‘pro tournament’ style is hugely attractive to them and we are just not tapping into this potential resource.
The site owner will no more invest in this type of marketing than he will serve up salmon pate for his customers and that’s because for the most part, our site owners live in the frikkin dark ages, they think they are being entrepreneurial geniuses if they offer two types of crisps and a chilli dip on their sites.
We need to bring in real businessmen, or educate the ones we have tho I fear the latter is a lost cause with what I know about the caliber of people we have over here running our sites.
And just as I used the Millennium league ranking to highlight our true plight when it comes to the relative quality of our teams I will ask you to ponder this :- go back ten years in your head (well those who can), and think what the average paintball site looked like when you arrived there…think about it…..and now think about what it’s like when you turn up on site now……still thinking ?
Ramshackle lean-to’s masquerading as staging areas, do I really need to go on ?
Things haven’t changed in ten frikkin years and look at how much the tourney scene has changed in terms of developing our sport. Our site owners (the ones who really make the money) have invested Jack sh!t in relative terms.
The tournament scene has evolved into a new, more modern breed of animal that is commensurate with what’s really going on and yet sites……hmmmmm…it truly is a joke and completely indefensible leastwise when you think about the 600 to 700 % mark up’s on their base line product (paint).
It’s a joke, it really is a joke.
What all this tells me is, there is no ethos of investment going on here, the only consideration is the short term making of money, exactly the same philosophy Del Boy lives by when he fills his grubby little suitcase to go down Peckham market stuffed full of second rate products.
Our sites are for the most part, a grubby little outfit when it comes to catering for our customer base and investing in its future.
We need to develop differing income streams and as I have said before, you can either increase income by increasing the existing market or you can diversify and offer a more extended choice and this is exactly what I am saying now.
Site owners should recognize that in investing in showcasing tourney ball, we are developing another income stream that can be hugely profitable if managed correctly.
We have a core customer base of rental in the hundreds of thousands, the conversion of these into rec and tourney players is always gonna be an emergent property of the access these people have to seeing other options of play, if these people don’t get a chance to see tourney or rec, then they ain’t gonna know what’s available, this is a no-brainer guys.
If we increase people’s (rental players) awareness then we increase the conversion factor, this is marketing 101 but the next question has to be, why ain’t the site owners doing it because make no bones about it, they ain’t (in any general sense).
If we do not in some way seek to convert more rentals into rec and tourney players by a process of education then nothing will change, as for any site owners developing a social conscience with regard to paintball as a whole, forget it, they are interested in one thing only and that is making money.
We need to educate them in how best to develop their base line player, and instead of that self same player turning up once every six months to play rental, we need to generate in that player, the desire to play paintball at a more serious level and convert him or her into a serious baller instead of an occasional one.
We do this and we convert a once every six month rental player into a once a month walk-on player and if we do the maths on this, it doesn’t take much to work out that developing these type income streams can make money…real money.
The net effect will be this (if any of this is done) will be an immediate contraction in the tourney player numbers because as sites open up walk-on options these will be exploited by the very tourney player who I am suggesting has been displaced.
This downsizes our tournament scene to a leaner and meaner animal and thus creating a more competitive environment because those who are left will more resemble the demographic we need to start producing better teams and players.
There will then be a period whereby rental players will be going thru an awareness program (hopefully effected by the site owners) and this will then start to swell both the ranks of the recball scene and ultimately funnel thru the competitive player we so need to the tourney circuit.
And there we have it, not rocket science, now here near and yet…and yet I know the knee jerk reaction of the general site owner is gonna be ‘Robbo, you don’t know what you are talking about’…….blah , blah blah.
My answer is simple; I do know what I am talking about so STFU and get on with developing our sport instead of bitching on here just coz you don’t like seeing what we all know to be the truth of the matter.
People like Dale Jeyes from the Jags has got some idea with his new site where he is concentrating on developing new talent and opening up training opportunities and I am sure there are other sites dotted about here and there who have similar outlooks but I’m afraid it’s not enough, nowhere near, we need more people like Dale and Co.
The reason for this optimism is because I honestly believed I was gonna come in for some real heavy flak for suggesting we as paintballers (the majority) were just not the right sort of person (or mindset) to allow ambition and aspiration to flourish in our tournament scene.
Coz let’s face it, who the hell likes somebody telling them they ain’t got what it takes, I certainly wouldn’t even if it was the truth ..and as we all have to acknowledge now, it is undoubtedly the truth.
It’s hard to deny facts, however patriotic or however much we harbour a misplaced pride in our performances and abilities but our showings in the Millennium exposed for us all to see, the downward spiral we had allowed to take grip…in the end, there was no argument, we had to face up to it.
As for answers?
Well, if I didn’t have any, I wouldn’t have started the thread, it would have been a pointless exercise on my part just to open up a can of worms like that and attract what I believed would end up in a hate fest directed against me for daring to criticize our tournament team base.
As soon as I realized what the real problem was, in that we had a displaced recball market residing in our tournament scene, it immediately told me the nature of the real problem and that as I said, was one of the wrong demographic, in other words, the type of person we have playing in our tournaments.
In essence, because we have no real recball (walk-on) scene over here, it displaces those people who would normally want to play rec over to tournament ball because this is the only place they can play ball and not have to play rental prices.
Once we accept this displacement it helps us understand why we do not generate teams of sufficient quality because tournament teams should be made up of players who are competitive and aspire to improve etc but as we now know this is not the case.
Occasional players, guys who just enjoy playing and do not posses that truly competitive edge end up playing in our tourney circuit for the reasons already mentioned.
If we are trying to emulate other countries in producing quality teams then we are trying to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.. it ain’t happening dude, leastwise not from our tourney scene demographic.
We in no way can criticize the guys who do make up our tourney scene because they are playing to enjoy the game and at that level they are hugely successful in achieving what they want and just because some of us want to improve paintball in qualitative terms doesn’t make me or anybody else ‘right’, leastwise to criticize them.
It’s just we have differing criteria for playing, that’s all.
Good luck to the majority of players over here is what I say because these guys can satisfy their needs for playing paintball just by picking up their gear bags and turning out, for other more driven people, it’s a lot harder but in my opinion, a lot more rewarding.
That’s another story though.
To put this situation right we have to do the following ;-
a) Identify and acknowledge our problem (which thankfully we have done now).
b) We need to showcase tournament paintball to rentals.
c) We need to increase the number of walk on venues.
We need to expose the flashy side of tourney ball to the young and there is no better way of doing this than to have some of those vids or dvd’s or whatever playing on some sort of monitor down the local site.
As I remarked in another post, you put that side of our sport in front of a bunch of young guys then their jaws drop.
This ain’t no bull****, I have seen it so many times, I have seen rental guys lined up watching my Nexus guys train against Shockwave or Jags. They look on in awe at the diving, bunkering, markers and so on and so on…….at a base level this game as played in ‘pro tournament’ style is hugely attractive to them and we are just not tapping into this potential resource.
The site owner will no more invest in this type of marketing than he will serve up salmon pate for his customers and that’s because for the most part, our site owners live in the frikkin dark ages, they think they are being entrepreneurial geniuses if they offer two types of crisps and a chilli dip on their sites.
We need to bring in real businessmen, or educate the ones we have tho I fear the latter is a lost cause with what I know about the caliber of people we have over here running our sites.
And just as I used the Millennium league ranking to highlight our true plight when it comes to the relative quality of our teams I will ask you to ponder this :- go back ten years in your head (well those who can), and think what the average paintball site looked like when you arrived there…think about it…..and now think about what it’s like when you turn up on site now……still thinking ?
Ramshackle lean-to’s masquerading as staging areas, do I really need to go on ?
Things haven’t changed in ten frikkin years and look at how much the tourney scene has changed in terms of developing our sport. Our site owners (the ones who really make the money) have invested Jack sh!t in relative terms.
The tournament scene has evolved into a new, more modern breed of animal that is commensurate with what’s really going on and yet sites……hmmmmm…it truly is a joke and completely indefensible leastwise when you think about the 600 to 700 % mark up’s on their base line product (paint).
It’s a joke, it really is a joke.
What all this tells me is, there is no ethos of investment going on here, the only consideration is the short term making of money, exactly the same philosophy Del Boy lives by when he fills his grubby little suitcase to go down Peckham market stuffed full of second rate products.
Our sites are for the most part, a grubby little outfit when it comes to catering for our customer base and investing in its future.
We need to develop differing income streams and as I have said before, you can either increase income by increasing the existing market or you can diversify and offer a more extended choice and this is exactly what I am saying now.
Site owners should recognize that in investing in showcasing tourney ball, we are developing another income stream that can be hugely profitable if managed correctly.
We have a core customer base of rental in the hundreds of thousands, the conversion of these into rec and tourney players is always gonna be an emergent property of the access these people have to seeing other options of play, if these people don’t get a chance to see tourney or rec, then they ain’t gonna know what’s available, this is a no-brainer guys.
If we increase people’s (rental players) awareness then we increase the conversion factor, this is marketing 101 but the next question has to be, why ain’t the site owners doing it because make no bones about it, they ain’t (in any general sense).
If we do not in some way seek to convert more rentals into rec and tourney players by a process of education then nothing will change, as for any site owners developing a social conscience with regard to paintball as a whole, forget it, they are interested in one thing only and that is making money.
We need to educate them in how best to develop their base line player, and instead of that self same player turning up once every six months to play rental, we need to generate in that player, the desire to play paintball at a more serious level and convert him or her into a serious baller instead of an occasional one.
We do this and we convert a once every six month rental player into a once a month walk-on player and if we do the maths on this, it doesn’t take much to work out that developing these type income streams can make money…real money.
The net effect will be this (if any of this is done) will be an immediate contraction in the tourney player numbers because as sites open up walk-on options these will be exploited by the very tourney player who I am suggesting has been displaced.
This downsizes our tournament scene to a leaner and meaner animal and thus creating a more competitive environment because those who are left will more resemble the demographic we need to start producing better teams and players.
There will then be a period whereby rental players will be going thru an awareness program (hopefully effected by the site owners) and this will then start to swell both the ranks of the recball scene and ultimately funnel thru the competitive player we so need to the tourney circuit.
And there we have it, not rocket science, now here near and yet…and yet I know the knee jerk reaction of the general site owner is gonna be ‘Robbo, you don’t know what you are talking about’…….blah , blah blah.
My answer is simple; I do know what I am talking about so STFU and get on with developing our sport instead of bitching on here just coz you don’t like seeing what we all know to be the truth of the matter.
People like Dale Jeyes from the Jags has got some idea with his new site where he is concentrating on developing new talent and opening up training opportunities and I am sure there are other sites dotted about here and there who have similar outlooks but I’m afraid it’s not enough, nowhere near, we need more people like Dale and Co.
