Paintball Journal

Sunday, December 9th. Splatz Indoor Paintball, Evansville, Indiana. Over 75 paintball players united for one cause: to raise as much money (labeled in picture) as possible for Toys for Tots.

It started over a year ago, when Evan and I were talking about what we’d do for our senior project, and how exactly we’d tie in paintball. The idea of running a tournament for charity came up, and I was set on the idea from the beginning. Evan took a little more convincing than I did, but he a pragmatic person who, I think, understood better than I exactly how much time and effort we would put into such a project.

Last year, senior projects for our school did not have to be completed until late spring. This year the time schedule got bumped up so that all projects had to be completed by early in the year, sometime in January.

This posed a significant challenge to those of us who wanted to do outdoor events, especially considering our school took their sweet time informing us about the changes to the senior project requirements.

However, Evan and I still were set on this idea, and took the initiative very early on to approach Eric Coblentz at Splatz Indoor about our tournament idea. Supportive from the beginning, Eric encouraged us to get our sponsors as early as possible and agreed to host an open tournament for us at Splatz.

So in late October and early November, we started getting our sponsors together. We raised $675, which was enough for us to guarantee $1000 in prizes. Team entries cost $90, and we only needed four teams to raise enough to give our prizes. We printed our flyers, and started distributing them through Splatz and Paintball Players MD, a local store that would be one of our platinum sponsors.

The week before the tourney rolled around and I totaled up all of the teams that had registered so far. Turns out there weren’t any, and wouldn’t be any until about the day before. Needless to say, a little bit of tension hung in the air in that final week.

I called Splatz the night before to make sure everything was a go, only to have a near ecstatic Suze Coblentz answer, telling me that 13 teams had signed up.

I slept well that night and woke up at 5:30 to leave for the field. We arrived around 7, having picked up some girls (labeled for your convenience) and donuts on our way over.

Though it took quite a while to get the schedule sorted out, we started the tourney around 10AM. With 19 complete teams competing, things had to go smoothly. The whole place looked pretty great, with lights and just enough space to fit everyone in comfortably, even if it was a little nippy in the main staging area.

We ran 54 preliminary games for two brackets, pretty much shotgunning the games one after another in order to get through them quickly. I spent the whole first half of the tourney manning the chrono and yelling for different teams to get their butts in gear.

Overall the tournament went pretty smoothly. One team got a little riled up when they won every game but didn’t make finals because they were in a tougher bracket. Unfortunately sometimes that happens, and I’ll be honest, we weren’t expecting so many teams and didn’t really want to have brackets in the first place just in case something like that happened.

Now, the information you really want to know.

The real winner was the Marines Toys for Tots Foundation. With the help of all who attended we raised nearly $1,400 for the charity, just in time for Christmas.

A very sincere THANK YOU to everyone who made this possible. That includes out sponsors, and especially

Paintball Players MD, who also provided free all day air and our reffing staff Team JFK!

I’d also like to thank Go Team Magazine for covering our event for their January issue, when our local newspaper wouldn’t.