What Chuck Does

Bachelor Party Paintball

It’s been over 4 years since I last paintballed. Since then my equipment has been sitting in storage collecting dust. So it took me 2 weeks to get the gear sorted out. Aside from my loader getting stuck on the balls, things went without a hitch today. No chop and no barrel breaks!

My friends (co-workers, high school and college guys) and I played 12 games. I can’t count how many guys I shot out, but I sustained minimal damage for 12 games. All hits against me were taken in the wrist to the fingers which implies I covered myself well. I think I took 3 shots in the fingers and 1 in the wrist. I was shot out only 2 or 3 times though because some of the balls didn’t count.

Paintball is by far the most intensive sport I have ever played. It’s so close to actual warfare that it conjures up the same fears and anxiety as I would imagine actual warfare would do to me. The adrenaline flows readily as I play and whatever injuries I sustain are never felt until many hours. I play so hard that I feel like I’m going to pass out, but the adrenaline keeps me going. As much as I hate getting shot, the satisfaction of shooting someone else is unreal!

My team was comprised of guys who would stay for today’s remaining activities. The point was team-building for the guys who are gonna stick together all day. Unknowingly, we put together a very capable team. Our strategy was to split our team up into a left flanking and a right flanking team and cross-up our shots to take out our opponents. Whether it was the strategy or the individual players’ skills is unknown but we won 8 or 9 of the 12 games. We did an excellent job pushing the field deep into enemy territory and towards the end of the day, communicating with verbal cues and hand signals. We worked extremely well together and dominated the other team. Though it seems unbalanced, the other team had 2 experienced players and was comprised of mostly my coworkers.

I am very pleased at how the event turned out. Most of the rental equipment functioned without a hiccup and we had more balls than we needed. The limiting factor was energy as we were all tired by 1:30pm after playing 3 hours of paintball. We had our own referee, we played back-to-back games, we had adequate rest between sets, and pretty much played as much as we could handle. I give this experience a 9.2/10.