The Pinata
08-16-2004, 02:47 AM
I recently opened up the NPPL (http://www.nppl.com/) website, and on the front page I saw an advertisement for the "Northeast Open". I can't think of a single major sport that uses "opens" as their major tournaments. The closest you are going to come with "opens" is tennis or golf, neither of which is a very televised sport. Let's take a look at every single major televised sport, and how they are organized. Baseball, Soccer, Football, and Basketball all run professional televised leagues that play an entire organized season, and have a definitive championship at the end. For baseball, it is the World Series, and in Soccer you see the World Cup.
If paintball is to ever get anywhere, it needs to give a nod to this tried and true system, and look at it as a way to develop. I realize we are nowhere near the point of being a professional sport, but we can organize ourself in a sense like Little League does. We run a regular season where teams compete to be the best in their state. Then the state team goes on to compete at a regional level, and finally the best regional teams go on for the world championship. This is a system fairly similiar to the Little League World Series, except we trade the concept of "All-Star" teams for the steady teams found in all the televised sports. In this, we have a single definitive championship which decides who the greatest paintball team in the world that year is. If we had a definitive championship like this, I could see one of the major networks like ESPN running the championship game every year.
But there is another lacking aspect to paintball as a spectator sport. The problem is that it isn't exciting to even a large part of paintballers to just watch the game. And why is this? Because speedball is almost always the same story. Both teams blaze away at 20 BPS, one team rolls the other, and you see several players bunkered. I realize there isn't a way to implement a "Home Run" or a "Hail Mary" into paintball effectively. Maybe we could make paintball an event with some sort of system of "Downs" or "Innings". You know, a series of rounds, where the total number of surviving players would be tallied at the end of each round, and the team with the highest total wins. But, there is another way to add excitement to the sport. Add variety to the fields. Individual teams should be sponsored by a commercial field, and the commercial field should provide a field that their team will call its home field. The teams should be large to allow for a lot of teamwork and chance. Look at rugby or football for an example of this in action. You have a lot of players on the field at any given time, and it works out well. But, we shouldn't just be using speedball fields either. Speedball is a pretty monotonous event after a while, and it completely ignores a lot of other types of paintball that are very popular. There should be a good variety of woodsball fields and unique as well. And teams should switch between eachother's positions every round to make sure it is balanced in that sense. Sure, the home team will win more games than visitors because they know their field better, but every team should play 50% home, and 50% away. Not only will the best teams have to excel at speedball, but they will also have to do well at woodsball and playing in unique environments such as mock cities or other environments. This means that the best teams make it to the world championship, not just the best speedball teams. This variety should fabricate the same excitement created by "Home Runs" or "Hail Marys".
If anybody is interested in creating a model for a paintball league like this, contact me in a PM, and we can work on developing a system that might actually work. I wouldn't personally be the one to make it work, but I would be interested in posting a final product on AO so that another might run with it and make it a reality.
Enough of that. Tell me what you think. I would like some opinions on this idea.
If paintball is to ever get anywhere, it needs to give a nod to this tried and true system, and look at it as a way to develop. I realize we are nowhere near the point of being a professional sport, but we can organize ourself in a sense like Little League does. We run a regular season where teams compete to be the best in their state. Then the state team goes on to compete at a regional level, and finally the best regional teams go on for the world championship. This is a system fairly similiar to the Little League World Series, except we trade the concept of "All-Star" teams for the steady teams found in all the televised sports. In this, we have a single definitive championship which decides who the greatest paintball team in the world that year is. If we had a definitive championship like this, I could see one of the major networks like ESPN running the championship game every year.
But there is another lacking aspect to paintball as a spectator sport. The problem is that it isn't exciting to even a large part of paintballers to just watch the game. And why is this? Because speedball is almost always the same story. Both teams blaze away at 20 BPS, one team rolls the other, and you see several players bunkered. I realize there isn't a way to implement a "Home Run" or a "Hail Mary" into paintball effectively. Maybe we could make paintball an event with some sort of system of "Downs" or "Innings". You know, a series of rounds, where the total number of surviving players would be tallied at the end of each round, and the team with the highest total wins. But, there is another way to add excitement to the sport. Add variety to the fields. Individual teams should be sponsored by a commercial field, and the commercial field should provide a field that their team will call its home field. The teams should be large to allow for a lot of teamwork and chance. Look at rugby or football for an example of this in action. You have a lot of players on the field at any given time, and it works out well. But, we shouldn't just be using speedball fields either. Speedball is a pretty monotonous event after a while, and it completely ignores a lot of other types of paintball that are very popular. There should be a good variety of woodsball fields and unique as well. And teams should switch between eachother's positions every round to make sure it is balanced in that sense. Sure, the home team will win more games than visitors because they know their field better, but every team should play 50% home, and 50% away. Not only will the best teams have to excel at speedball, but they will also have to do well at woodsball and playing in unique environments such as mock cities or other environments. This means that the best teams make it to the world championship, not just the best speedball teams. This variety should fabricate the same excitement created by "Home Runs" or "Hail Marys".
If anybody is interested in creating a model for a paintball league like this, contact me in a PM, and we can work on developing a system that might actually work. I wouldn't personally be the one to make it work, but I would be interested in posting a final product on AO so that another might run with it and make it a reality.
Enough of that. Tell me what you think. I would like some opinions on this idea.