My 2013 season
Preseason
At the end of 2012, I played the final leg of the CPPS
tournament in the Race-2 Premier division with Snatch, winning the tournament
to also secure a 1st place victory for the series. That same morning
though, I also played with the freshly reformed Reading Entity in the Division
1 Race-4 bracket, where we won every game dropping only 2 points all day.
Coming into the 2013 season I was pumped up. With the taste of a successful event and a successful season still in my mouth, I was hoping to prove myself as a worthy contender in the Elite division of the CPPS. Whilst the team did well in that final event of 2012, I know that I struggled to keep up, I was getting shot most and I was sitting points. Therefore my personal goal in 2013 was to move my way up the pecking order and become a solid starting-5 player for the team and see how many games we could win.
When the preseason training kicked off I had worked hard, I was improving all the time, my stance was getting less goofy, and I was starting to hold my gun properly instead of implementing ‘the claw’. I would be at the Cribbs training ground every Sunday, whether it was a mandatory team practice or just me and a couple of randoms going up to practice our skills. The Saturdays I wasn’t working (half of them) became training days. I was determined to become the best player I could as fast as I could and I knew that this required, that I build on 2 main aspects: technical skills and experience. Whilst there were only so many tournaments I could attend in the year to gain valuable experience, I decided now was the time to work on my skills.
When it came to the team, there was a buzz, everyone was putting their all into getting better. We worked on a combination of personal skills with snapshooting and breakout drills, followed by mid/end game situationals such as 2v1’s, 3v2’s, 5v3’s or 3v3’s. Harry had put together a sick winter training video of us training in the snow. The atmosphere was magnetic and we were all psyched up and ready to prove we can play.
Coming into the 2013 season I was pumped up. With the taste of a successful event and a successful season still in my mouth, I was hoping to prove myself as a worthy contender in the Elite division of the CPPS. Whilst the team did well in that final event of 2012, I know that I struggled to keep up, I was getting shot most and I was sitting points. Therefore my personal goal in 2013 was to move my way up the pecking order and become a solid starting-5 player for the team and see how many games we could win.
When the preseason training kicked off I had worked hard, I was improving all the time, my stance was getting less goofy, and I was starting to hold my gun properly instead of implementing ‘the claw’. I would be at the Cribbs training ground every Sunday, whether it was a mandatory team practice or just me and a couple of randoms going up to practice our skills. The Saturdays I wasn’t working (half of them) became training days. I was determined to become the best player I could as fast as I could and I knew that this required, that I build on 2 main aspects: technical skills and experience. Whilst there were only so many tournaments I could attend in the year to gain valuable experience, I decided now was the time to work on my skills.
When it came to the team, there was a buzz, everyone was putting their all into getting better. We worked on a combination of personal skills with snapshooting and breakout drills, followed by mid/end game situationals such as 2v1’s, 3v2’s, 5v3’s or 3v3’s. Harry had put together a sick winter training video of us training in the snow. The atmosphere was magnetic and we were all psyched up and ready to prove we can play.
CPPS
Going into the first event, we were confident. On the
Saturday we trained against Lucky 15’s and one of the Firm teams and we were
winning a lot of points. I was playing on the teabag side with either Harry or
Andy following me up. The team was communicating well, we had all learnt the
calls and whilst there were errors, we were looking good.
When Sunday came our first game was against London Nexus. What a draw for your first game of the season! I was quiet and with me that means one of two things; I’m either annoyed or frustrated and I’m holding my tongue or I’m nervous. This time it was the latter, I went out and on the start gate I didn’t know what to expect. I got to my primary and was shooting a lane and to my surprise I heard “G1!” from the side of me. I made a move into the teabags and I made it in clean and at that moment I realized – this is just paintball, this is the same paintball I’ve been playing so much of the past year. 5 guys with 5 guns shooting 5 guys. Don’t get me wrong, we still lost the game, putting only 1 point on the board but hey, we just put a point up against a CPL team. That’s the first time in my paintball career I could say that – that’s the first time in my paintball career I had played a CPL team!
When Sunday came our first game was against London Nexus. What a draw for your first game of the season! I was quiet and with me that means one of two things; I’m either annoyed or frustrated and I’m holding my tongue or I’m nervous. This time it was the latter, I went out and on the start gate I didn’t know what to expect. I got to my primary and was shooting a lane and to my surprise I heard “G1!” from the side of me. I made a move into the teabags and I made it in clean and at that moment I realized – this is just paintball, this is the same paintball I’ve been playing so much of the past year. 5 guys with 5 guns shooting 5 guys. Don’t get me wrong, we still lost the game, putting only 1 point on the board but hey, we just put a point up against a CPL team. That’s the first time in my paintball career I could say that – that’s the first time in my paintball career I had played a CPL team!
Personally my performance was shaky that first event. The
nerves got to me. But as the day went on I was warming up to it. Later in the
day we played Snatch, my old team, they had come up to contend in the Elite
division as we had and I’m not going to lie, everyone on the team expected to
smash them. I expected to smash them. I knew the team and as much as they had
many years of experience, I knew they didn’t practice regularly and certainly
not as much as we had over the past couple of months. Player for player I would
have put us over them 90% of the time. We lost. Maybe we didn’t take them
seriously and so played an over-aggressive game. I can’t explain how or why but
I was getting shot off the break or soon after reaching my bunker in most of
the points – I played better against Nexus! For some reason they were my stump
team, not just for the first event either – but for the rest of the series I
just wouldn’t perform well against Snatch. I consider them all good friends of
mine which made it worse. Were they smug about beating us after I left them for
this team? Of course they were. Could I blame them? Of course not, they earned
it.
As the year went on – I found my reasons to get better out
of each tournament. We put up a lot of points against a lot of experienced
teams. We had 2 very close 1-point games against Disruption. We lost to
defiance 3-4 after being up 3-1.. That hurt! What’s even worse with that game
is that I gave a celebratory fist pump as I headed towards their flag station
to put up our 3rd point. Our snake side was getting a bunch of
penalties at bad times; the hotheads of the team were kicking off in the pits;
plus our game plans were not all that decisive as we arranged our primaries
without much attention paid to what we were going to do next. We were always
getting points but we weren’t winning the crucial ones. For me that was fuel
for the fire, I would hit the training field with renewed determination, so that
we could win that next game-point. But for others, as the season went on, all
the hope and the near-misses seemed to be grinding them down.
In the last event of the season we went out to get closer to
that elusive podium position, we lost a close game to Durham DV8, the newcomers
to the division, which seemed to set the tone as we went out and we lost to
Tigers and Disruption 4-0. That really hurt. All season long at the CPPS we
were never 4-0’d. To come out and get skunked two games in a row, especially by
Disruption who we had come so close to beating the past two times… it sucked. Andy
and Dave, the two guys with the most experience, were blowing up at each other
in the pits. I went quiet, this time not out of nerves. The team had lost its
head and as a result, we had lost games. It wasn’t the losing that made it
hurt. It was the hope getting stamped out like a discarded cigarette that
really twisted the knife.
Fortunately we closed out a close game with the Firm that
day. I recall on the drive home, I wasn’t too bummed out. I realized I had
accomplished my personal goal which was to become a solid starting 5 player for
the team. I sat about 4-6 points in the first CPPS event and sat 1 point in the
final event, but aside from those points, I played every single point that
Reading Entity had played that year.
I have found in paintball as well as other areas of personal development that there are times where you ‘plateau’ or ‘slump’. You go to training and you under perform, you’re not hitting your targets or you simply can’t win a snapshot battle against your team-mates that you consider your equal. I’ve experienced it before and seen it last as long as a month or two; a long time when you’re practicing every weekend. It’s frustrating, infuriating and it can be enough to make people pack up and go home, sometimes to pack up playing. But somehow, fortunately, I didn’t get that feeling at all in 2013. If I felt I had under performed, I trained through it and just carried on and luckily I would see the other side quickly, but I don’t think that works for everyone.
I have found in paintball as well as other areas of personal development that there are times where you ‘plateau’ or ‘slump’. You go to training and you under perform, you’re not hitting your targets or you simply can’t win a snapshot battle against your team-mates that you consider your equal. I’ve experienced it before and seen it last as long as a month or two; a long time when you’re practicing every weekend. It’s frustrating, infuriating and it can be enough to make people pack up and go home, sometimes to pack up playing. But somehow, fortunately, I didn’t get that feeling at all in 2013. If I felt I had under performed, I trained through it and just carried on and luckily I would see the other side quickly, but I don’t think that works for everyone.
I felt that my game was consistently good, rarely bad but
also rarely great. I need to develop
that ability to ‘find another gear’, especially playing the 1 on the teabag
side. I was rarely shot out of my bunker in a gunfight, but I was also rarely
taking risks. I was a very solid survivor, but not one consistently causing a
lot of damage.
Super5ives
Everyone preaches about ‘giving back’ and there are many
people who give back more than they got from the paintball community. Those
people do it for the love of the game and whilst I love the game, I started a
fun / starter / scratch team, The Cribbs Commandos, to play the Super5ives for
my own selfish interests of getting experience organizing a team and coming up
with my own game plans. I also wanted to play for fun as well – knowing that it
doesn’t really matter if you fuck it up brings a new dimension of
experimentation to your game. At the Super 5ives I would try to force as many
game changing moves as I could and be the explosive player that I wanted to
become at the top levels. It was just fortunate that as a result, I got to
share my experience with some hungry local players and give them the chance to
come to a tournament and prove their skills.
The other reason behind this team was that my
girlfriend-at-the-time’s brother, Adam, became a bit of a project of mine. He
reminded me of myself a year or so in the past; shabby round the edges, a bit
of a goof with stance, a reserved player not taking loads of risks, but also
willing to learn and determined to become a better player. I had him up at
Cribbs training with me a lot and he has come a long way. He wasn’t Entity
standard just yet and so I got him to play the Super 5ives whenever he could.
Earning him that valuable game time he needed to balance out the progress he
was making with his technical ability, with all-important experience.
Fortunately I think we won most of our tournaments in the race division – you could argue me and the Entity guys who joined in were sandbagging, but at the same time we were taking with us players that hadn’t played much tournament paintball before.
Fortunately I think we won most of our tournaments in the race division – you could argue me and the Entity guys who joined in were sandbagging, but at the same time we were taking with us players that hadn’t played much tournament paintball before.
Learning the
lessons
To round up and look forward; this season the team suffered from hot-headedness in the pits, penalties and sub-par game plans. Whilst the behaviour of my team is something I can only influence, I intend to push the team towards working harder on their breakout shooting so that we can implement more effective game plans. Personally I have been a solid survivor and so when playing the 1 on the teabag side I intend to be a bit more aggressive; trade out with my mirror if we’ve got the body advantage or if he over extends. However I also feel that perhaps my consistently solid playing style can be used in the 2 position now that I have improved my gun-skills massively. In 2014 expect to see me switching between the 1 and 2 on the teabag side, I can’t wait to see how I get on.
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