What a sport, but lately it's been kind of a tragic story. I started playing around 2003, and played competitively in Canada through to what basically became the sport's peak.

In 2007 we were playing division 1 in a league with Impact - they'd later become a pro XBall team - and the first 7-man tournament in that division, we spent $750 per person for paint and entry for the weekend tournament. We shot more than 30 cases (that's 60,000 paintballs). We squeaked by into semis, and then got annihilated.

It made me realize that (a) being competitive at the highest levels of a sport requires incredible dedication on the part of everyone on a team, and (b) nobody would start playing paintball if they knew the endpoint of it was to drop a grand on a single weekend of play.

The dynamics of play got especially rough for new entrants - if you didn't have the gear that let you shoot fast enough and accurately enough to put in someone who was posted on you, you'd get stuck and frustrated. The more paint in the air, the fewer strategic options you had (other than putting more paint in the air), and the more prohibitively expensive the sport got.

I still love the sport but it set itself up to die the moment there was a recession, which, of course, came in 2008.