First of all, a personal shoutout to all of my paintball family, both old and new, with whom I spent this past weekend.

It's been a while since I have breathed the air that hovers over a paintball tournament, carrying whiffs of sweat, dirt, greenery, grilling hot dogs and buggers and roasted pig, porta-a-johns, cracked shells, lubricants, anxiety, excitement and strains of other things unmentioned.  And I loved every minute of it.  I even found myself itching to pull a trigger a  couple of times, though owing to this and that, my playing days are in the past.

I was quite happy to visit this particular event and the Panhandle Paintball field, despite the 8.5 hour drive to get there, as Dan Colby, one of the field's owners, is a long-time paintball friend.  I hooked up with Dan back when he first launched Air America and introduced HPA to tournament play;  my team was, in fact, one of the first Air America  sponsored teams.   Air America morphed through Guerilla Air into Immortal Air, a company that is still supplying high quality air products to the game.

I arrived on Friday afternoon on the day before the event and got to meet Steve and Gail Preskill;  Steve and I have bumped into each other over the years but I had not previously met his wife, Gail.  She's a hoot - and a professional one!  She recently had a paying standup gig, so keep an eye out for the Netflix special.

The field was under different ownership previously and the Preskills have only been working on it for a bit over year, but it is obvious that they've got the knowledge and background to put a solid field together;  not to mention, as I heard at least several players say - Best Air At An Event - Evah!  There's a nice field house with a concrete-floored porch for hanging out, several airball fields, several woods fields (astonishingly for Florida, at least one with huge oak trees, not just scrub pine), a good handful of pop-up tents and tables for staging, plentiful parking, well-constructed netting barriers and a general layout that, once again, reveals the wealth of experience behind their operation.  Did I mention Gail?  She does a great job behind the counter.

Steve and I shared scoring duties for the event, though I'll admit that Steve (the other one, not the Steve writing this report.  You got that?  Steve, not Steve) did most of that during the day.  He also kept on top of the schedule and dealt effectively with the issues that arise from time to time (always) at any event you might happen to attend.  All with a smile on his face.

And then there's Ines, the Head Referee.

I was unaware of the fact that Ines played for Tampa Bay Damage before heading north to the panhandle.  She started playing at 12 years of age and has been going strong for the past 15, playing and reffing.   She handled both herself and her reffing crew so well that the reffing became part of the scenery, an essential element of the event, but one that you didn't have to worry about.

Ines was tasked with a very tough job, having little time to whip a relatively inexperienced reffing crew into shape.  It is to her credit that I did not hear one player at that event saying anything resembling "F*****g Ref!".  And that's astonishing, as it's one of those go-to phrases players use all the time, whether it's justified or not.  Yes, there were calls that were questioned; yes there were mistakes made, but the teams gave the reffing crew the respect it ought to command (one of the most thankless jobs on the planet) and the refs returned the favor by hustling, working hard and learning fast.

For two days I was able to enjoy hanging out with my paintball family.  There were old friends to hook up with in a place we'd never met before (Panhandle), people like Kevin Donaldson, who is solely responsible for drawing me back in to paintball and will no doubt pay a high price for that in the after life.  Kevin and I worked on the ASO series (which introduced performance-based team seeding and ranking for the first time;  he and I, along with Fred Schultz (who was also there - we did some videos for his Flag Pull Productions podcase Mr. Fred & Friends) were there at the beginning of the NPPL, and apparently we're all working on this WCPL thing now.  (Sometimes paintballers take a while to get the hint, probably owing to too many shots to the noggin, so here's a more blatant version:  we, and many others working on WCPL, have been doing this tournament thing from the beginning, and now we're doing it again.  It's our generation of players that brought you national tournament play, bring your own paint, team seeding and ranking and a whole host of other innovations, such as the 1-for-1 rule, that are fundamental to today's tournament game.  When you're thinking about attending one of our events, throw that into your decision-making mix.)

I got to hang with the Band, a team specifically pulled together to play in the WCPL, with many old time friends like Chip Kuhrt, Tim Schloss, Dave Rudig,. Charlie Holton, the aforementioned Fred, Spike, Tom Ghee, Rob Walker and others.  Dan is on the Band as well, but had to skip playing to oversee running of the event. 

Speaking of Rob...

I was asked to take a picture with Kiersten Pedersen of the Valkyries team.  Kiersten is playing with a newly formed offshoot team that's been named "NFT", and no, that doesn't stand for non-fungible token, it stands for "No F******g Tomato".

Back in the day, one of the things that everyone in the "in-crowd" of paintball did when they came to Orlando to play and work the World Cup was to go to Charley's steakhouse for an industry dinner.  At one such event (which I have absolutely no rememberance of, and that plays into the story) we were seated at our table and I turned to Rob and asked him to order me the beefsteak tomato appetizer if the waiter showed up before I returned from a bathroom call.

When I came back to the table, the waiter placed a beefsteak tomato in front of me and the conversation went something like this:

Me:  "What's this?"
Waiter:  "Your beefsteak tomato appetizer, sir"

Me:  "I didn't order no f*****g tomato!"

At the time Rob informed me that I had asked him to order it for me, I apparently denied having done so (though I do like tomatoes).  Subsequent health issues and a visit to a doctor following another such incident revealed that I'd probably had a TIA or so-called "mini-stroke".  Which means that after  20, 25 years, my TIA has achieved such legendary status that a team is now named for it.  What the heck, I always wanted to have a place in history.

Speaking of similar things:  James "Howdy" McGuffog, another old time paintball friend whom I first met when he was playing for the Master Blasters, who despite team rivalry became a good friend over the years, announced that the WCPL Panhandle Paintball Classic was to be his retirement event.  After FORTY years of paintball, it was finally time to hang up his cleats.

Howdy made the announcement during the awards ceremony and it was quite moving and emotional.  He particularly thanked Kevin Donaldson, with whom he's been teammates for those 40 years, for dragging him back into the game (Kevin has a bad habit of resurrecting old times.  If I didn't know his last name, I'd have to assume it was Frankenstein).

The fields.  What higher praise can I give to a playing field than "I want to play on that field".  I walked both the Mounds and the Woods field and was asked for my tactical opinion, which I gave to the Band.  Unfortunately, they didn't have the bodies to execute, as a lot of my plans involve a lot of running.

The best part of the Woods field was that it was sufficiently wide to force teams to have to decide where to put their strength, because the field was impossible to lock down tape to tape.  No matter where  you put your bodies, there would be gaps.  This, combined with a sufficient number of trees and man-made bunkers properly situated (not too many, not too few) is what makes for a great playing field.  Experienced field owners know - BOTH too many and too few bunkers can kill the playability of a field.  No one will tell you they have that problem at Panhandle.

Saturday evening the field hosted a pig roast.  I had a good time, the food was pretty good, it was only marred by not enough of the teams hanging out.  I had some great conversations with those who were there - it seems some people have this idea that I might have a clue about some paintball stuff.  Or at least they were kind enough to tolerate my stories.

In future, particularly at WCPL events, realize that the schedule is not a rushed one - we're there to have a good time AND compete, not exchange one for the other - and there will be things like pig roasts, player parties, team photo sessions, maybe even some informative lectures or classes being offered.  Build some time into your schedule for such things.

I made some good new friends at this event, met some teams and players who I think have a future in this game.  I'm sorry that I can't name each and everyone of them specifically, but between time and space constraints and a faulty memory that has never been good with names, I simply can't.

But what I can do is mention you in follow-up commentary if you are sufficiently moved to get in touch, here on the blog.

So to conclude - congratulations to all of the teams who attended, the staff who did a phenomenal job, to my paintball friends and family both old and new - thank you coming, thank you for playing in the WCPL and thank you for helping us (all of us) put on an event that everyone will remember as a great time, for a good long time.

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If you want to have as great a tournament experience as those attending the Panhandle Paintball Classic, you are in luck!  The WCPL New York Classic fast approaches and you can sign up on PBLeagues right now.  You'll get to play on some of The Most Hallowed Paintball Ground in the world, not to mention it is already an international event with teams comes from Germany and the UK!  Don't miss it.  (And hey, if you nice to me, maybe I'll even write about you!)