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Sponsorship- The Holy Grail Of Paintball Trickin Out Your Paintball Gun Paintball Good Safety Record |
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Sponsorship- The Holy Grail of Paintball
By Bruce "Charon" Johnston on May 20, 2007 Ask not what your sponsor can do for you... What is something that every paintball team wants and few have? Sponsors. Sponsorship is the Holy Grail of paintball. If you have sponsors you are considered to be in another class among paintball teams. Anybody can find a sponsor for his or her paintball team. The one thing you have to keep in mind is that the potential sponsor only cares about one thing, selling more products. Sponsors need to be convinced that investing in your team makes good business sense. Ideally, the company’s name will be “marketed” to a segment of potential customers in a positive manner, which will result in more exposure and sales. Welcome to the cold, harsh, economically-driven “real” world. It’s all about the bottom line, and most sponsors need to see dollar signs. Since “sponsorship hunting” can be as competitive as a Tournament final, you have to know your strengths and weaknesses in order to devise your “pre-game” strategy. Before you take the field in your quest for a sponsorship flag, you need to ask yourself some questions. What makes your team different or special? If you were a business owner, what would you want and expect from a team you are sponsoring? Find (or establish) some unique traits about your paintball squad. If your team doesn’t stand out from the crowd, you are going to find it difficult to attract and maintain sponsors. Ultimately, how can your team benefit a potential sponsor? If you can answer that question you will have a much better chance of finding sponsors. To avoid being eliminated on the break – so to speak – your first impression (and reputation) must be positive. It’s essential for you to have an information package for potential sponsors that is professional, concise, and clearly identifies the benefits you offer. The package should contain “hard copy” documents and pictures that you can physically hand to business owners and company reps: 1. Team name, logo, home location, website, and contact information (including phone & email) 2. General team history 3. Names, ages and experience of team members 4. Color photographs of each team member 5. Practice schedule and home playing location 6. Tournament / public events schedule 7. Current equipment list of each team member 8. Team achievements / awards / press clippings, etc. 9. List of current sponsors 10. Team goals This seems like a lot of information but if you don’t prove to the sponsor that you are serious, you won’t be taken seriously. Put the package together and present it to the owner of your home field. Your home field owner is the most natural sponsorship candidate, and best audience for your first presentation. Hopefully you’ll dazzle him with your brilliance and he’ll sign on the dotted line. Then, start pursuing other business owners by presenting the package to anyone who can contribute to your team, no matter how small the contribution. |
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Trickin Out Your Paintball Gun
By Dave Goodin on May 20, 2007 Paintball Gun Mods - The First of a Series of Articles Relating to "Mods That Make Sense" Do you remember the first time you played a scenario or woodsball™ game? Do you remember looking at the more experienced players’ paintball guns with their killer mods, drooling over the way they looked, and wishing your stock Tippmann™ 98 Custom or A-5 could look as good as theirs? Well, my friend, the wait is over. The availability of mods (specialty parts, kits, and upgrades) for the paintball gun market these days is astonishing. Recently, the mil-sim market has exploded with new product, innovations, and ideas. Special Ops Paintball leads the way with an ever-increasing availability of paintball gun mods and upgrades. Whether you want to change the way your gun looks, performs, or both, Special Ops can help make it happen. The use of Weaver rail systems can make a huge difference in the ease of changing the appearance of your paintball gun. Weaver rails allow you to mount many different accessories, such as ), hand grips and bipods, just to name a few. Paintball gun manufacturers like Ariakon™, Airgun Designs, and Warsensor are even starting to make Weaver rails standard features on their new products. Tippmann paintball guns have a 3/8 dovetail mount, and a 7/8 dovetail mount that you can use to attach Jet City Specialties® Weaver hardware like the following. JCS - 3" Long Offset 7/8 Accessory Rail Mount for 3/8 Dovetails. With these rails in place, you can mount your choice of optics, tac lights, or laser sights. Aftermarket barrels are another upgrade that will significantly change your paintball gun’s performance. If Tippmann is your gun of choice, and you want some extra distance, then the Flatline Barrel may be what you’re after. This barrel will ad about 100 feet of range over other barrels on the market by adding backspin to the paintball. Use of high grade, medium bore balls is highly recommended. However, accuracy will suffer a bit by using this barrel. If you’re using the Tippmann A-5 as a platform, the Flatline battle shroud gives you many mounting options for any type of equipment that you like, that requires a 7/8-inch Weaver rail. There are other choices for barrels as well. If you go to a lot of scenario games, you’ll notice that most event organizers establish a field or even paint only (FPO or EPO) policy, where players can only use paint that is sold at the field. If this is typically the case for you, a Python compression kit setup might be a good purchase. It comes with several different bore sizers which each slide into the provided barrel back, allowing you to use just about any size paint. Then just screw your old barrel into the front to complete the kit. If you want to go with a single barrel, or several different barrels, you have a wide variety of choices available from Special Ops Paintball for the A-5 or the 98C. If you want to add stability and balance to your paintball gun, adding a stock and remote line will work wonders. A stock will add tons of stability to your paintball gun by allowing you to brace it against your shoulder and use iron sights, a scope, or a red dot sight. With over 35 different stocks to choose from, Special Ops can help you get the stock you want. Remote lines help balance your gun out by taking your Air tank off the marker, and letting you put it on your back with a Vest . This vastly increases the mobility and balance of your marker, letting you bring it to bear on your target more quickly than before. Whatever you are looking to do to your marker, whether it is about looks or performance, Special Ops Paintball has you covered. After all, we do exactly the same with our paintball guns. |
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Paintball Good Safety Record
NEISS NEISS - The National Injury Information Clearinghouse of the U. S. Consumer Product Safety Commission in Washington D. C. has provided injury estimates through use of the National Electronic Injury Surveillance System. In the number of estimated injuries per 1,000 participants, paintball had the LEAST NUMBER OF INJURIES of all the listed sports. The number of injuries for paintball is less by far than bowling, tennis, archery, basketball, and many other sports. The government report warns: "CAUTION. NEISS data and estimates are based on injuries treated in hospital emergency rooms that patients say are related to products. Therefore it is incorrect, when using NEISS data, to say the injuries were caused by the product." That means that the paintball total injuries include all types of injuries, and would include sprained ankles, cuts, heat exhaustion, etc., on and off the playing field, at organized play sites or otherwise, as well as any eye injuries. The estimated figures are calculated using data from a sample of hospitals in the U. S. and its territories. (APG JAN. 2001) Sports Injuries Report
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