Paintball Journal

We were at our field about a month ago, you know, just playing it up. The weather was great; that dry autumn weather that has a crisp morning, but by ten o’clock the temperature sits at a comfortable 65-70 degrees. Everybody was having a great day. No gun troubles (amazing actually), and really nothing to worry about whatsoever. So of course something has to go wrong, although we were far from thinking about it at the time.

We ended up playing another team for a few games, and it turned out that we were about at the same level. It surprised us because they were shooting guns much faster than our Ions, and were fully decked in matching Dye C6 jerseys. So, naturally, we were expecting to get our cans handed back to us on a golden platter. It turned out that they won two, and we won two, and all were awesome games to play. Very close both ways.

Well we find out that two of them were just walk-ons, and complete jerks. I guess you’ll get those kinds every now and then. Trouble started when they called paint check on our friend at least four times in one game, thinking they had hit him in the hopper. I wouldn’t expect him to cheat or anything, because he’s a probably one of the most honest guys that we hang out with, and when the ref’s came over they didn’t find any hits. Well, to make matters worse, our friend ends up bumping and takes a few of the guys out. So now the two walk-ons think that we cheat, and they just got shot out by a ‘cheater’.

We play a few more games. They cuss out the team they were playing with for not doing something right. Then they start cheating. We film nearly every game we play, and it’s real obvious when we are filming from only a few yards away that when the dude gets hit in the ribs, he simply ignores it and keeps on playing. He bunkers out our friend, but I shot him up from a few feet away a few seconds later. Then the other jerk had bumped up across field and hadn’t seen me. Put several more in his side. All this probably just annoyed them even more.

Shortly after that game, we decide that we were going to play some indoor. Within a few minutes of us leaving our table, they steal a brand new Ion from the team they were playing with all day, and then proceed to steal my friends wallet, car keys, cell phone, and whatever else he had in his Nike bag. They just snatched it. This is the same friend that they thought was cheating the whole day. I believe it was just out of revenge, because they could have stolen a heck of a lot more than just that. I don’t know, maybe they just thought we wouldn’t notice.

But they were kind of wrong there, because when we went to pack up, we could no longer get back into the SUV, the same SUV that carpooled half of us that went up. We searched for the stuff, and hearing about the stolen Ion, it was obvious what had happened to it, especially after looking for over 45 minutes with no luck. So we get ahold of his dad, and he had to drive up to bring extra keys… This is to a field that is around 50 minutes away.

Well, a sheriff did show up, and he made a few calls. We had the dudes’ phone numbers and addresses from where they had signed in, but they just denied it. There really wasn’t much else we could do at that point. So, we went home somewhat busted from what we thought was turning out to be one of the best days of paintballing. But I guess we could look at it and think that we were quite lucky it was only keys, a phone, a wallet and some money. They could have taken the car; anything our group had left lying there, which there was plenty of stuff. Paint…our phones…maybe a camera or two. Our friend had to change the locks to his house, and cancelled the phone too. The driver’s license wasn’t a real problem.

So yeah, we were lucky that we learned from something like that, instead of getting something much worse stolen. Now I guess we’ll just have to leave the stuff in the cars, which is a bummer, but it has to be done. So, learn from our mistakes. Don’t wait until your thousand dollar gun gets stolen before you think about it. It’s so much better to be safe than sorry.