Looking back on the start of the 2014 season.

So I've played a couple events now with my boys after what felt like an eternally long off season. Our first event at the CPS in Rome, placing 3rd in Semi Pro, went better than I personally expected. CPPS round 1 was a heart breaker, but no-one can say we didn't play well as a team. Every team says they'll play smart, aggressive paintball and adapt to overcome.. it's a huge cliché but I'm actually starting to learn what that feels like. We have a solid core now, with Shayne and Liam seeming to work well together on the snake side and me and Andy (shake and bake) have been gelling well teabag side whilst our back guys, Tom & Dave are consistently doing a good job as turrets and game closers. Of course we've all been playing different roles but that seems to be our primary setup.

Last week I was asked fairly last minute by Manchester Firm if I could come and play at the first round of the Millennium-Series in Southern France, then Germany and maybe more. I asked Andy about it and to be fair he wasn't overly enamored with the idea but I told him I want to play as much competitive paintball I can but my priorities lie with my team, I sorted it with work and said yes.

I'm looking forward to playing all this paintball! Nothing else I do in my life is able to make me feel large degrees of elation, fear, hope, disappointment, anger, superiority, anxiety and other cocktails of feelings in one weekend.

This weekend I trained on Saturday with Dave and Sunday with Adam. Saturday we just worked on our skills, snapshooting, breakshooting and running & gunning. Dave set up 3 bunkers in a row and another 3 bunkers opposite which we propped targets against. We were were practicing our snaps left and right, then running and gunning across, just firing 4-5 shots throughout the run to keep paint consumption down. At the end of each set I started running down a cone before switching hands to shoot the other.

Today (Sunday), I put a teabag in between the stand up and the small temple to make reasonable sized distances to bump to. Me and Adam were working on our dominance, gunfighting, snapshooting and run&gun skills by making a game out of seeing how many bumps you can make against the other person.

I'm glad I got a chance to just work on the basics again, the past 5 weekends I've been playing tournaments or scrimming and so haven't had a chance to brush up on my snapshooting. But now I'm quite confident across the board and I'm looking forward to hitting Puget-sur-Argens this coming weekend!

Good luck to all the other UK teams heading out, make sure you say hi!

I shot 1 box on Saturday and split 3 boxes with Adam on Sunday so overall that makes 51,000 paintballs!