5 years give or take. All of the guys i had been playing with for a few years had drifted away, i had bought a small business that was taking up most of my time & my youngest daughter was rodeoing. I’ve been back at it for the last few years & a few weeks ago one of the guys i used to play with texted me out of the blue. His son had just turned 10 & he was wanting to get back into paintball. I feel like it’ll be short lived but i have to say that playing with him again after ~12 years was the most fun I’ve had in a while.
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20 year hiatus from 2000 to 2020
Started playing in 1994 at the age of 12. Mostly played (semi) outlaw woodsball. It wasn't a commercial field, just a loose group playing on some scrub land with the owner's permission, using the back lot of a pawn shop as a staging area. No field fees, business license, insurance, etc., just a few guys from the local Coast Guard base who would come every other weekend or so with a beat up old van full of paint and CO2 tanks. Play was open to anyone who knew about it and could behave themselves. Turnout could range from 8-10 players to 2 or 3 dozen on a really good weekend. Great natural field of red clay washout gulleys and patchy southern pine forest and had a real three dimensional quality to it. Played there as much as I could throughout middle and high school. I last played there sometime in the spring or maybe early summer of 2000, right around when I graduated high school.
Went off to college and took my gear with me. It just sat in a bag under my dorm bed, as there wasn't a field in town at the time (Tuscaloosa). I was too busy with school to search for fields around the nearest city, Birmingham, and without the group of friends I had been playing with for years, I wasn't terribly motivated to look. Decided early in my freshman year to pursue my dream of marching drum corps, so most of my free time was taken up with practicing, then going to monthly rehearsal camps once I miraculously got a spot in Spirit of Atlanta. Marched drum corps the summer of 2001. When I returned to college in the fall, my gear went into a closet in my apartment, where it sat for the next 6 years as I completed undergrad then law school. I never made a conscious decision to quit playing paintball, it just got crowded out of my life, quietly and gradually going from something I did to something that I used to do.
I never completely let go of it, though. That gear bag made every move with me from school onwards, sitting in closets and storage sheds as I changed apartments and houses. Despite not opening that bag for twenty years, it was still like a little piece of myself that I could not imagine parting with. So it sat and waited as I focused on work, other hobbies, getting married, buying a house, becoming a father, and so forth. To the extent that I gave it much conscious thought at all, in the back of my head I think I kind of assumed that paintball had destroyed itself, or had been destroyed by video games, airsoft, and ubiquitous broadband internet access. Those last few times I had played in 1999 and 2000, the early electros had started to make their way into rec woodsball. We quickly went from thinking that putting more than three balls on someone was overshooting to having 14 year olds hosing people down with shoebox Shockers. The writing was on the wall, and I did not like what I saw. It was obvious that what I would later learn became known as the BPS Wars was coming. So I just didn't feel all that motivated to find out what had become of paintball.
Then 2020 hit and the world stopped turning. The Y was closed for months and I was climbing the walls. As things started to reopen down here, a friend invited me to tag along on a corporate team building paintball outing with his workmates. I opened the old gear bag for the first time in two decades. Wasn't able to use any of it for that outing, of course, but the memories came flooding back. At the field, during the first game that day, somewhere between the starting station and my first bunker, a version of my 18 year old self woke up in the back of my head screaming "WHERE THE FUCK HAVE YOU BEEN FOR TWENTY GODDAMNED YEARS?!!"
I ordered rebuild kits from AGD before I even got home that day.
A few months later, I found my way to Southern Alabama Paintball and discovered that the ringleader of our old outlaw group from the 90s had since retired from the Coast Guard and now spends his Saturdays reffing there. I have been playing on a roughly monthly basis ever since.
The Automag: Not as clumsy or random as an electro. An elegant marker for a more civilised age.
www.reddit.com/u/MrBarracloughComment
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13-14 years. Used to play a lot of speedball when I was 13-16 years old but just lost interest as can happen when you're a teenager...
Saw a random paintball Youtube video and the spark ignited again.Comment
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About 16 years. I got back into it around 2019 because I realized in the off years I had moved to another place only a half hour away from one of the greatest fields ever and I made enough money to buy any gun I wanted.Comment
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I was at 12 years in, non stop (lifestyle) kinda of paintball life. Took a 15 year break as my career took off and life happened but checked in on the sport now and then.
I was just back to the states and missed the chance to fish 3 beautiful weekends in row due to small craft advisories and crap sea states. Thats when it dawned on me that I used to play every weekend and ocean didnt matter. So I started again. As of the last 2 years, I play once a week, ref the youth league, and tinker. My "sick" days are for fishing these days and the weekends are for the field.Comment
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2006-2009
Started playing in the late 90s. Loved it, lived and breathed it. Began playing local tournaments in HS and did better than anticipated, got addicted. Became captain of my college team and it was an absolute mess. After some months of rough scrimmages and bad experiences with the local scene I lost my shit and rage quit in 2006 when someone stole my brand new Ultralite while I was filling my air.
Fast forward to 2009 and I decided to check out a local pro shop on a whim after work one day. Guy with a thick RI accent running the place said they have an outlaw group that meets every week, and a lot of people shoot pumps. This sounded novel so I bought a Trracer and played outlaw with them the next Sunday.
I’ve been playing just about weekly ever since.Last edited by Jonnydread; 06-12-2026, 06:26 AM.💀 PK x Ragnastock 💀Comment
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2005-2015
I started playing sometime in 2001-2002 with some guys from high school. We were just 6-7 guys at best playing outlaw in our own backyards. Once we left high school we lost touch and I didn't touch paintball until 2015. Funny enough I met up with someone else that happened to go to my high school and we shared 40k as a hobby. He asks me if i played paintball and then I somehow ended up from having owned 4 markers to a revolving door of 174. I haven't stopped since (minus the concussion or ankle injury here and there). He has since moved to Georgia, but I go when I can.Comment
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It must've been 1999 or 2000 when I discovered paintball, would've been 12 or 13 years old then. Asked for a Tippmann 98 Custom for one of my birthdays and got that and a JT NVader mask. We lived on an acre of wooded land and my best friend lived up the street. We'd play woods ball constantly between our two yards. Went to the local Dick's sporting goods store to refill our CO2 tanks and buy cases of paint.
I don't recall discovering much through the Internet at the time, so I must've seen some type of flyer or something about upgrade parts for the 98C and I eventually got an expansion chamber, double trigger, and "sniper" barrel for it and learned how to disassemble, install the new parts, and maintain the gun myself. Even rigged up some loops out of string that closed inside the receiver halves to attach a sling to the gun.
I played through high school and kind of just stopped after graduation as I lived in an apartment at this time, and friends who I played with moved away or our lives just changed priorities.
Didn't really think about it much over time. Then in like 2013-ish my brothers and their friend groups were really getting into airsoft and playing games in the woods. I bought an AEG replica of a G3KA4 rifle and enjoyed playing "woods ball" again but always felt I preferred paintball better. The airsoft scene was too asymmetrical in that one of our buddies had a green gas powered sniper rifle that had probably double the range of our standard electric guns. We all had varying quality of electric guns that would become finicky over time. Plus most players wouldn't always feel the hits since the BB's are so small, the distances can be large, and their velocity could be reduced by the time they hit their target. Couple that with wearing protective gear, and it got frustrating when people wouldn't call their hits, whether intentionally or not. Eventually that fizzled out as life happened. Still have the AEG but it likely needs work to get functional. No intentions of playing airsoft anytime soon.
Fast forward to fall 2024 and I'm sitting at my oldest son's cross country practice with some other dads and the subject of paintball comes up and we all begin reminiscing about our old gear. I do a quick Google search and find out there's a new .50 cal format and wonder what that is. Afterwards, I get home and dig my old Tippmann out of the closet. My gear bag has always sort of traveled with me and found its way under a bed or in a closet over the years. Never considered selling any of it. I've lost the NVader mask over time, but still had the 98C, the gravity fed hopper, my gloves, and the 2 12oz CO2 tanks in the gear bag. Screwed one of the tanks that felt like it had some CO2 still in it and the gun aired right up and I was able to dry fire it, basically after about 18 years of just sitting around.
I dissemble the gun to look at what the internals all look like and the o-rings need replaced, but it's not too bad. I would always disassemble and clean the gun after every game so it was well-maintained. Like riding a bike, I knew where every part went and started cleaning everything. Quickly got online and started looking at the upgrades I'd always wanted but couldn't afford back in the day. Eventually got a response trigger, lighter trigger spring, heavier hammer spring, RVA, electric hopper, replaced the hammer and sear since it was slipping when engaged. Read about polishing the internals and eventually just stripped all the paint (a camouflage pattern) from the receivers and gave the marker a face lift.
Following that winter, I finally get back out to a field. I live in Northeast Ohio and frustratingly couldn't find a field less than a 40 minute drive away. I choose one by my work and it's more of a rental-player's field. No regulars or equipment owners. Wound up playing with a birthday party group and despite them being inexperienced, it was a blast. Played for a few hours as rentals cycled in and out. Never saw another equipment owner that day. Found out the field I used to go to from time to time as a kid, Splatterpark, was still open; it's a little over an hour from me. That's more your typical paintball field where you'll find regular walk-ons and equipment owners, as well as rental players. I intend to try out the other 2-3 fields within an hour from me this season.
Since joining MCB in fall of 2025, I now have, in addition to my 98C:- TiPX
- magfed 98 (MCS Blizzard)
- Phantom
- Also amassing parts to build a Nova duckslide Phantom
- Emek
- Micromag
- 2 GOG eNMEys (POP 2026 builds)
Last edited by gnarlynick; 06-12-2026, 08:48 AM.Comment
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I felt like I took a break from paintball for 2025 as I only played 4 times the whole year, which is waaaaay down for me. To put that in perspective, I've played about a dozen times in 2026. Main reason is I was pretty into my league tennis last year and it took me hurting my serving shoulder to make paintball the number one hobby again. yes despite a hurt shoulder, any lower movement doesn't hurt, so I could play paintball just fine.Comment
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