Ballin' on the beach!!

Well, been HUGELY busy with my business so again, the missile ends up taking a backseat so sorry for neglecting y'all. Until the tees come in here's a lil' does of cool to show you what I did last weekend to blow off some steam.

My pals and I used to play pro paintball a few years back as a hobby, which kind of led into an obsession and we actually became very good at it, even played all over Europe and in the first European X-Ball premier league called the EXL. Anyway, times change and you need your money for other things so we had to call it a day and move on in life, always with an eye on what goes on within the sport. As a designer I loved it as I could have some fun designing all our custom jerseys for our first team (K2) then the special jersey for the EXL team we played for from London (Shockwave). Staying in touch with people from the sport has led to me designing a few bits and bobs here and there, most recently a logo for the newly formed promotions company, Balls Out Promotions. These guys do a fantastic job organizing events that players really want to play and are hugely selfless in their approach, opting for a longer term plan rather than going for the quick buck that most series promoters go for. Their latest event, which gets me back to the point, was labeled 'Ballin' On The Beach' and was played at the South Pier in sunny Blackpool. The guys who run BOP are pals so the whole logo design thing was a trade for trade affair, which I didn't mind at all as playing tournament paintball can be expensive, especially when you're trying to save for a wedding, so a logo for a weekend of top class paintball was more than a fair deal for me.

I have to admit the logo looked great on the banners they'd had done and the staff tees were striking, plus whoever did the website and flyers have followed the theme and carried it through the branding which works quite well. Its good to see them really making an effort to do things properly and actually taking the sport, which in the UK has been on the decline of late, forwards and back up where it belongs with all the other fringe extreme sports.

Quick run down of how the game works. The format, 5 man X-ball, has 2 teams of 5 players, but each team will have around 7-10 players in the squad to rotate around but only 5 on the field at any one time. Game time is 10 minutes with each team having a buzzer in their starting point. The idea is to shoot all 5 players with the main aim of hitting their buzzer, by hand, to gain a point. Then the clock stops. 2 minutes to get off the field, cleaned up, load up with paint, air and re-evaluate your game plan. Back on the field and the clock is restarted from your original 10 minutes...game on!! This happens until the 10 minutes is up or one team reaches 4 points quickly. Awesome game, exciting to watch and intense to play, a real good extreme sport that is a little different to all the others out there.

Here are some pics of me and my buddy in action from various games, to be honest, we were still pretty awesome considering it'd been a while, only problem being I think we've got the bug again. I'm in the red mask and my boy Latham has a yellow one.

Big thanks to Rich Harris and all the Balls Out Promotions crew for putting on a paintball saving event, special thanks to Rich for hooking me up with a spot on his team, Legacy and a huge thanks to the young guns on Legacy who let us 'old guys' sneak in to see if we still had what it takes.

I think we did.












Can't forget to add a HUGE thanks to my wonderful fiancee Tracey, firstly for coming along to see what it was all about and actually admitting she really enjoyed it, and secondly for taking loads of cool shots of us throughout the weekend. We both really enjoyed having our girls there after years of them listening to us whine on about how awesome paintball is, they now know why we loved it so much. X

Comments

  1. Dude that looks SICK! I love xball.

    Where did you get the cool jerseys from?

    ReplyDelete
  2. Hey Matt, yeah dude X-Ball is amazing I haven't played for time but we dusted off our custom GFH Egos and fell right back into it, was properly awesome!! Nearly had an asthma attack after the first game though.

    Jerseys were all my own handywork, the red and black Manchester Shockwave ones have a drawn up Nissan Skyline on it with all our sponsor logos added like street racer stickers, plus I made a bunch of car mod company pastiche logos too. The blue one was for our K2 team from 03 I think, we always looked sweet when tearing up the field.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

OPEN FIRE!!

Popular Posts