Ohio University's paintball club has shot up from nonexistence to national recognition in five years.
The paintball club's class-A (varsity-level) division placed second in the National Collegiate Paintball Association's championship, held in Lakeland, Fla., from April 17 to 19, and finished with its first undefeated season in the mid-Atlantic regional conference
this year.
The team lost to Purdue University, but jumped from third to second this year.
Purdue had an advantage with its recent addition of professional-turned-collegiate player Adam Geist, said Dave Blaushild, club president and a junior studying marketing.
To bring a pro to a college paintball tournament would be like bringing Manny Ramirez to an OU club baseball (game)
Blaushild said. How could you not win with a professional on your team?
Ohio's 30 paintball players stepped up this year by adding an exercise regimen developed by Dave Primrose, a fifth-year student studying accounting who has been with the team since it became an official club sport
in 2005.
Since the team began climbing the ranks, members have experienced an influx of sponsorship and national attention.
Members will be appearing for a second time on the Fox College Sports network in June, and have received custom-made helmets and discounted equipment from sponsor and major supplier JTUSA, Blaushild said.
The team has to travel outside of campus for practice as well as competition, resulting in excess travel fees compared to clubs that practice on campus. These expenditures, along with the hundreds of thousands of paintball pellets players use per practice, have put a major dent in the club's budget, Blaushild said.
The biggest hurdle, Blaushild said, has been finding practice space. Players are setting up a training ground in a donated field 20 minutes from campus, to be named Centerstage Paintball, he said.
Our goal is so that we can get this field going to where we can start bringing other organizations and other OU students out to the field and charge them to play paintball Blaushild said.
Blaushild said having few outlets in the area keeps the members isolated in
their practice.
There's not a lot of paintball here Blaushild said. We're lucky we have so many kids in the club because we're able to play each other and get better on each other's skills.
Primrose said, for him, paintball was a big player in his college search.
I applied to 12 schools
and I want to say four to five of them were strictly due to paintball... But I ended up going to a school that had nothing to do with paintball at all
he said. I feel like I'm part
now
of one of the people that built this beast. We couldn't even place in a tournament our freshman year; now we're second in the nation.
Blaushild said he hopes OU will begin to utilize his team's success. Compared to the team's growing national attention, local interest has been mild, he added.
Kids are actually coming up to us and saying they know
they watched the college rankings and ... they're choosing OU as a school because paintball is what they love to do
he said. If we get OU to look past the word 'paintball
' then it would help them out.
