CPPS 2012 - Round 2

What better describes a day of paintballing in the cold, rain and mud than a GRUELING BATTLE! Every time I hear the word GRUELING it reminds me of the teaser of the DERDER Video of the “PSP M.A.O. (Midland Atlantic Open)” …

To the event … since Round 1 our Division had the “GRAND” opportunity to play in the cold early morning hours of the first week of March we this time “thought” we would have the advantage of playing after 1 p.m. when the Premiership B was called to the field in some warmer conditions … oh dear how wrong we were. Througout the day we had some very nice spills of water which the later in the day it was the colder it got. The most memorable situation was having a conversation with each other and during the conversation I got the chills, suddenly saw the breath of the people standing in front of me and while I was waiting for a statement of “I can see dead people.” like the young Haley Joel Osment in "The 6th sense" – then the sky opened and HAIL was falling to the ground … we just all started laughing.

We – as usual – had the first game of our Division, which started great with some great slides into our primarys (the mud was like a slip&slide) and we literally took that momentum winning our group stage dropping 2 throughout the day. In this round we played a final to determine the winner of the 2^nd Round. Although it was a very wet and cold event – it seemed that we successfully played the field and decided the final in a 2:0 for us as well – which gave is 1^st place for Round 2 at the Premiership B of the CPPS and on overall 1^st place in the series ranking, closely followed by Team Domination. So we have 2 more rounds to go to "defend" our position ...

Speaking of Team Domination – we had a great chat with them at the event and decided that we will be driving up to the CPPS site in the coming weeks in preparation for the Millennium Series – Round 2 and train with them on a Saturday in the coming weeks. We also invited them down to Bricketwood Paintball – our local training site, so we are really looking forward to that.

Here us – after the event, muddy, exhausted and happy. Next Stop … BITBURG!  

New Jerseys and Teams – Samurai Paintball is growing and growing

Besides the good old training and working on our skills in Samurai MV – there is a lot going on behind the scenes which many might not be so aware about.

The 2012 jerseys have arrived the Tuesday before the Millenniums and we finally had a chance to bring them to training and hand them out to our sister teams. They all loved them and it looks like there will be a second round of orders in the next few weeks.

Samurai Paintball, which consists of a number of teams, puts in quite some effort and time in recruiting/introducing tournament paintball to interested people and teaching people the basics of the sport.

This effort has clearly paid off – since Samurai MV for example is a team of people that all started tournament paintball with Samurai Paintball and worked hard to play together and get where they are today – instead of poaching and hunting people out of other teams we rather give new talent opportunities and match people with similar playing levels to progress together as a group.

This might not be the “fastest” way in playing in a higher league – however it does give us the advantage of a large player base and the chance to help teams out across “Samurai Paintball”. On top of that you just get to know each other as a team much better – do you pick up a new person here and there – of course – but you do have a core that has been playing together and it is a lot faster in getting a team working smoothy with each other than just throwing 5-7 talented players together … not that it doesn’t’ work (as you can see with teams like Houston Heat – it clearly does etc.), but you also GROW the sport and the player base, which we think is also partially the responsibility and ownership us Ballers.

So I wanted to take the opportunity to quickly introduce our “young” sister teams this month to you since they recently played their first round of the PPL (Paintball Players League) – which is a newbie and introduction tournament for people that are new to the sport – pictures from the teams are the teams of that round, some people are permanent member of the teams – some are just jumping in for this tournament to give it a try … so don’t wonder why you might see a few different faces in the future. =)

Samurai Rage – been around for a while and built as a feeding pool for Samurai MV, but most members left in the 2011 season, so we restarted it with some fresh blood and can’t wait to see where they will be going in the next 12-18 months.

Samurai Warriors – the 4^th team created, in 2011 – a white piece of paper with a lot of space to write stories in the future. They were a bit short this weekend - but we had 2 Samurai players that helped them out ...

 

Samurai Reloaded – Our Polish team, all members of the team are polish and some only speak polish. A really great bunch of guys, which you can talk with even with a little English - they love the game and have progressed quite a bit over the last months.

There are two more teams that belong to the Samurai Paintball family, which are the “original” team Samurai and 2011 formed team Samurai Topcats, who previously played as London Topcats and joined the Samurai family since they were struggling in getting a full roster for an entire season – which we wanted to help them out with – which has been working nicely. We have not mentioned them here yet – since we thought we’ll focus on the “fresh meat” and “new teams” today, but we’ll cover them later this year once we have some pictures and footage since they will be joining us in the CPPS playing the 5-man Championship and Conference from Round 2 onwards.

We can’t wait to see them joining into the series, since we think they have a good chance in doing very well - so watch this space ...