My thoughts after playing X-ball
Well, on the 20th of July, the team I play for ( Misfit Toys) participated in an X-ball trial at our homefield Paintball Adventure Park in Taneytown MD, set up by Diablo.
Diablo supplied us with 20 cases of paint and sent down the refs that will be reffing the Nations Cup to ref us.
Opie of Trauma ran everything. It ran very smoothly, I was suprised at how well it ran. We didn't have the scoreboard in use that they will have in Pitt. But everything was displayed on Opie's laptop and he verbally kept us up on the times and scores.
The refs seemed on top of things. They had to make up a few penalties for us, as we don't push the grey area very much. They wanted to see how well it worked having guys come out of the penalty box in mid game. I must say, it worked much better than I thought it would.
Everybody that I discussed it with on my team loved playing this.
It took about 2 hours to play one complete game. Talk about exhausting! There were times we were back on the field like 6 or 7 minutes after we came off the field. You'd have to be an olympic athlete to play this way all the time. I dont see x-ball ever overshadowing the current format for this reason. But it was very fun and a new format like this is a sure fire way to escape burnout.
The only problem they encountered was the coaching from the sidelines. I'm not exactly sure what they didn't like about it. My theory is that it was sometimes too difficult to make a good move since there was always a set of eyes that could see what you did and then convey that to the other teams. I thought it slowed the game down a bit and made players a bit more cautious, and thats totally opposite of what they are trying to do with the x-ball format. From what I can tell, the sideline coaching is still up in the air and may or may not be going on at the nations cup.
I dont remember what the score was at the end of four quarters, but it was tied and we had to do a sudden death overtime quarter. Well that didn't go so well for my squad as it came down to 5 on me. Yeah, you guessed it, we lost by one point.
I must say our captian Eric Holland did a fantastic job for us. Not only did he get us involved with this, but he managed to get enough of our guys out there to field four 5 man squads, two coaches and a handful of support people to fill guppies and tanks between games. I'm sure everybody here recognizes the herculean task in getting that many people together and running smoothly.
On a lighter note, Graham Easton was one of the refs and every single time he spoke on the field, I just stood there, I had no idea what he was saying.He must be the designated ref to handle the English team. If they all talk like that nobody else will understand them. They invented the stinking language, how come they don't speak it?
Well thats about covers it, if anybody has any questions about how it ran that I didn't answer, I'll be glad to scour the old memory
Tremis
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What's with all the xenophobic rubbish?
t heeeeeeeee
