2014: The Preason (yeah, that's a word now)

From here on out this blog will be used as my paintball diary with some helpful training guides thrown in. So without further ado let's catch up to now: The end of February 2014. As a bit of fun I'm also tallying approximately how many paintballs I've shot this year.

January

The first week of January was very cold and The Crib (the name I'm pushing to get people to use for my local home ground: Cribbs Pro Paintball Centre) was closed and so 0 paintballs used in the first week.

The site then opened and as I have to work 26 Saturdays of the year, I was trying to burn as many as I can as soon as I can and so for the rest of the month I was just heading up on Sundays. On the 12th I shot 2 cases (total: 4,000) doing some drills and primarily trying to work on my breakout shooting as I expect to be running head down into my primary bunker a lot less this year.
On the 19th I shot a case and then shared another with a friend, as sharing is caring (total: 7,000). Still working on my drills and joining in with other guys playing a few games on the field. 

Photgraph by: Harry Pitchers - ShootrTV

Sunday 26th I was very hungover as I had spent the previous evening celebrating my birthday with my real life friends, my paintball friends and everyone in between. I drank a lot, but as I was committed to the cause I stayed in a hotel next to The Crib and went and shot another case (total 9,000). The wind was very bad though so I was mainly joining in with the other teams playing points. 

Total paint shot for January and the year so far: 9,000 balls.

February

February 1st I had work and so Sunday 2nd was training day. It was the first team training of the year and we got together to work on some breakout shooting drills, some snap shooting and some 2v3 points. We shot 2 cases each between us (total 13,000). The field layout wasn't out yet for our first event at the CPS Rome in March and so we were just practicing our skills. 

Photgraph by: Harry Pitchers - ShootrTV

Unfortunately February 9th was called off due to very high winds blowing the field around like no-one's business. Even the pit area roof was blown down at The Crib, but midweek it was upgraded to accommodate for the Cribbs Cup the next weekend.

February 16th was the inaugural Cribbs Cup event, the Saturday beforehand was used to set up the site so no training again this weekend unfortunately but at least I got to watch the games and help run the day. For a full write up see my previous article. 

I get excited by scrimming

The last weekend of the month: 22nd & 23rd February was a mandatory team training weekend with Reading Entity. On the Saturday we worked on skills and introduced Tom Stafford to the team for the first time. We mostly worked on first shot accuracy, doing snap shooting drills against targets, running and gunning between bunkers and then some snapshooting against each other. Everyone shot a case although me and Andy went halves on another box, bringing this day to 1.5 cases (total: 16,000). We did a very small 'course' drill which I will explain in another article very soon.

Sunday 23rd was a very valuable experience for us as we welcomed The Manchester Firm all the way down from.. well, Manchester, to scrimmage with us. We started out the day working on 10 second breakout drills, where we would focus on 4-5 guns up breakouts to work on our breakout shooting and working out how to shoot people getting to particular spots. I found that both us and them were very aggressive with this and therefore a lot of players got shot out in the short amount of time, often with 2+ players eliminated from each team. The breakouts were very close and we seemed to match each other body for body during these very quick points, with the Firm bagging probably just a few more kills than us overall.

After we had finished the 10 second breakout drills we decided to start the real scrimmage and play points against each other. This was a good experience for me and very valuable as in training previously I would almost always choose to gunfight against my teammates, being pretty confident I would beat them. When I tried that against guys from the firm who I didn't know to gunfight with, I found that was not the way to win the points. I couldn't predict who I could beat and who I couldn't and so from that I personally took away the lesson of not underestimating your opponents when you don't know what you're up against. Probably a very valuable lesson to learn in time for Rome in less than 2 weeks!

Both teams were playing tighter during the breakouts as we did in the breakout drills, which I thought was a bit odd and maybe something to be addressed next time we do breakouts against another team. I did get shot a couple times off the break running guns up into the corner and so the team was fighting on the back foot quite often. We lost probably 75% of the points we played, but there was only a couple points where they rolled us quickly, the rest were drawn out into long points. Whilst we had beaten some of the Firm teams last season at the CPPS, the 5 guys that came down were some of their core members and had been playing together for more than a season, so it was no surprise we got beat when we were giving the new guys some spins.

It's good that we got beat up a bit instead of winning the majority, as you don't tend to see your weaknesses when you're winning, only when you're losing. As a team we realized we weren't reacting quickly to their game plans and that's something we need to keep at the forefront when in the pits between points in Rome. We need to recognize what's killing us and find the best way to plug that hole in our game plan.
That day we shot roughly 2 cases each, bringing the total for February and the total for the year so far to 20,000 paintballs shot.

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Sunday 2nd March will be our final team training session before we head out to the CPS in Rome! I will write up the training session and how I feel we are getting on.