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Color them bad

To hear some people talk, paintball is about friendly competition, camaraderie and the spirit of teamwork.

    It’s about, of all things, utilizing math skills. It’s about adrenalin rushes and women affectionately called “momma” passing out cookies to young and old alike.

    But what about the fun stuff ? Like, well, you know, shooting people?

    “When somebody sticks their head out, and you hit it just right – right in the face, that’s why you play, man, to crack somebody in the head.”

    There we go. The statement was made by local paintball participant Bill Burgess.

    Alas, even these words were said with a laugh. And not even a devilish one.

    This past weekend, the Northern Plains Ultimate Crown Tournament Series of paintball (NPUCTS, as the kids say) was held in Dilworth. There was a lot of mud, a lot of grilled burgers and 28 five-player teams from around the Midwest. Plus, lots of broken stereotypes.

    “People are like, ‘Oh, you’re shooting.’ They’re not guns, they’re paintball markers. It’s a difference,” said Jennifer Veronen of Verndale, Minn., the aforementioned momma and cookie provider. “It’s fast. It’s an adrenalin rush. It’s a huge teamwork opportunity. Paintball as a sport is a great team builder, it builds your morale.”

    Moorhead’s Brian Doucette plays on the local team known as the Toy Soldiers.

    “Personally, I don’t own a gun and I wouldn’t shoot one,” Doucette said. “It’s not just going out there and shooting each other. It’s a sport that has a lot of strategy involved.”

    The teamwork was evident during many of the 7-minute-maximum battles at Saturday’s competition.

    A pair of traveling fields filled with inflatable objects were set up on a mucky mess of land.

    The object was simple. Take out the opposing players with paintballs fired at approximately 280 feet per second and capture a flag set up in the middle of the field.

    Players barked commands to each other, searched for just the right firing angle, provided cover fire to advancing teammates and used hand signals usually seen in movie scenes involving S.W.A.T. teams.

    As for the morale building?

    “When you do well, you get a real good feeling about it,” said Mike Schell, a member of Team Fission, which ran Saturday’s event. “You don’t always win, you don’t always get good prizes, but sometimes you do well and you just really feel good about it.”

    You can also make a really good living off of it. Forest Hyatt of Brainerd, a bespectacled 45-year-old who was filling up competitors’ guns with compressed air throughout the day, is proof. Hyatt started playing paintball in 1982. The former movie theater projectionist, pizza delivery man, radio station announcer, bus driver and bus mechanic now runs a pair of paintball companies: Have Guns Will Travel, and Paintball Connection, a retail store in Brainerd, Minn.

    Hyatt said his company went through approximately two cases of paint and 5,000 paintballs in its first year. They now go through 200 cases a week and he said the sport’s popularity has especially grown the past seven years.

    “I knew it was too much fun. It was way too much fun not to catch on,” said Hyatt, who also provided one of the portable air fields for the tournament. “That’s why I stuck with it for so long.”

    Heck, the sport has even caught on with God-fearing folk. Hyatt said paintball setups are very popular for Bible camps, and there’s even an organization called Christian Paintball Players Association (“A group of Christian paintball players that desire to advance the Kingdom of God by taking the Gospel to the paintball community,” according to the group’s Web site).

    Keeping everyone safe, of course, is an even more important goal than capturing the flag. Players are decked out in masks and goggles specifically designed for paintball. They look like something the Homeland Security Department would recommend you stock up on along with duct tape and plastic sheeting. But as long as the projectiles aren’t striking ears or eyeballs, the danger isn’t real high.

    “Sometimes you feel it, sometimes you don’t,” Hyatt said. “It hits hard enough to know that you got hit, but not so much that you wouldn’t do it again.”

    Although a family-reunion atmosphere did permeate the tournament, paintball is still a competition with something perhaps more important than cash on the line: bragging rights. Accusations of cheating – wiping away hits or one-sided refeering – were whispered about. A visit to a message board on Team Fission’s Web site revealed some teams won’t be sitting around a campfire together anytime soon.

    Which is to be expected in any sport, though. This sport just has one added little perk.

    “It’s the only sport where you can hunt people,” Burgess said with the same goodnatured laugh. “And legally.”