The Rush of Paintball Essay

Submitted By momosley8
Words: 1997
Pages: 8
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The Rush of Paintball Paintball is an awesome sport to watch and play. With its non-stop action and thrill, it is possibly one of the most fun noncontact sports to play. Whether it is getting shot out, or capturing the flag to win the game, the excitement never stops. Paintball came around in the late 1972’s when the Nelson Paint Company created a gas operated gun which shot balls of paint commonly used by ranchers and forest services. They were commonly used to mark trees for removal, and cows to be pulled from the herd. The game itself was created by two friends; Charles Gaines and Bill Gurnsey. After years of searching, the two decided they would use the Nelson Paint Company’s markers and paint to develop a sort of nonlethal survival game. Shortly after, in 1981, the two men and a group of twelve friends had the first ever paintball game. Over the years, the game became more challenging and complex. More rules were added because of the growing number of players, as well as different game types being added. The most popular game was capture the flag, which is what most professional teams play today. The first outdoor field to play was opened in 1982, and the first indoor field was opened in 1984. Paintball continues to be a popular game throughout the nation, and still attracts more and more people.
Justin, my interviewee, is a freshman in college. He is undeclared in a major, but wants to end up in dental school and become an orthodontist. He has been playing paintball off and on for the past three to four years and decided to join the OU Paintball club this year. Justin tells me that the practices can vary from being very difficult to incredibly easy. At a normal workout session, the club will run two and a half to three miles to build endurance, sprints to build speed going from bunker to bunker, upper body workouts, and abs workouts. At a normal practice, which takes place on Saturday mornings, the members will warm up together and do all sorts of stretches to avoid being injured in the matches and to stay limber. The club will scrimmage each other doing 3v3 scrimmages which are speed ball games. Speed ball is a game where there is around a twenty minute time limit with different rounds and a flag placed in a central location. To win the round you must capture the flag. When the flag is captured, the time stops until the next round. If your team is winning, the members will want to take longer to capture the flag to waste time. After the scrimmages, the club will challenge walk on people, or people that are inexperienced for a game or two, and teach them some of the basics to help them learn the game better. After the play against the walk on people the team will clean up the bunkers (air up obstacles to hide behind) by washing the paint off, and then will go eat together at Wendy’s. The bunkers all have technical names, such as the triangular ones are Dorito’s, the cylinder ones are cans, the triangle with the top cut off is called a temple, and the long skinny one is a snake. Some of the slang they use as vocal commands is “one d-side” which would mean there is someone by one of the Dorito bunkers. “Snake 50” means there is someone half way up the field behind the snake bunker. When an enemy gets shot out they will say “Dorito side is G” which means the enemy that was on the Dorito side is now shot out of the game. In this case, Dorito could be exchanged with any other bunker name, such as snake, or even a direction such as “back right is G.” Another technical term they say is reloading which obviously when they reload the gun. However they cannot say this loudly because an enemy might hear. Some of the terms about the gun is the “marker” which is the gun itself, the hopper which is what holds the paint and feeds it into the chamber, and the barrel, which screws onto the end and helps with accuracy.
Unlike a real rifle, a paintball gun does not have a rifled barrel, which looks similar to a drill
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