[Yes, I posted this to Reddit also this morning. Most of you don't appear to be on Reddit so I thought I'd post it here as well.]
Here's a little mental exercise/thought experiment for everyone who sometimes finds themselves shepherding rentals on open play days.
The Setup: It's a brand new day of paintball at your local woodsball field, with the typical mix of self-equipped regulars and clusters of rentals, a majority of the players being the latter. The field mixes everyone together (but does a decent job balancing teams). The games are on the longish side (say 15-20 minutes) and therefore usually have some kind of respawn mechanic that varies from game to game. Your team includes a birthday party of about a dozen or so kids around 11-13 years old, none of whom have played before. Everyone has gone through the safety brief and chronograph station, and now you've got about 15 minutes of downtime in the staging area before the first game kicks off. Your rentals are excited to play and eager to learn the secrets of paintball from the "pros," who they take to be anyone wearing a pod pack.
The Question: What can you feasibly teach these kids in that 15 minutes that will help them play better and thereby have a better time?
Remember the parameters:
Here's a little mental exercise/thought experiment for everyone who sometimes finds themselves shepherding rentals on open play days.
The Setup: It's a brand new day of paintball at your local woodsball field, with the typical mix of self-equipped regulars and clusters of rentals, a majority of the players being the latter. The field mixes everyone together (but does a decent job balancing teams). The games are on the longish side (say 15-20 minutes) and therefore usually have some kind of respawn mechanic that varies from game to game. Your team includes a birthday party of about a dozen or so kids around 11-13 years old, none of whom have played before. Everyone has gone through the safety brief and chronograph station, and now you've got about 15 minutes of downtime in the staging area before the first game kicks off. Your rentals are excited to play and eager to learn the secrets of paintball from the "pros," who they take to be anyone wearing a pod pack.
The Question: What can you feasibly teach these kids in that 15 minutes that will help them play better and thereby have a better time?
Remember the parameters:
- You're in the staging area, so no shooting practice, but you can pick up your marker (with your barrel cover firmly in place) and use it as a visual aid. They can also practice holding, shouldering, and aiming their rental Tippmanns.
- Assume the kids are paying attention and are interested in hearing what you have to say, so long as you don't go off into some tangent about arcane paintball lore.
- Your audience has no prior knowledge of paintball outside of what they just learned in the safety briefing. You may presume that you don't need to cover basic safety and gameplay instructions.
- Emphasis on feasibly. Simply dumping as much information as you can cram into 15 minutes will guarantee that they retain precisely none of it. The crux of this excercise is to identify what information would be most useful that the rentals have a decent chance of retaining and actually applying on the field after only 15 minutes or less of instruction.
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