Paintball Basics

John Greeley shares his techniques on how you can become a paintball champion!

Hi! My name is John Greeley. I'm Manager at Hogback Mountain Paintball. I've been involved in paintball for eight years. This is Richie. Richie has been involved in paintball for four years. He is the team captain of the team Atrom (ph). Today we'll be going over what is paintball, safety of paintball and also demonstrating how paintball markers work. Paintball is a team building sport. It's used for corporate outings, recreational paintball, groups of friends and also school groups, church groups, you name it. Paintball can probably fill that gap. There are two different types of games, woodsball and speedball. Woodsball is normally played in the woods and there are more natural bunkers such as trees, bushes, log stacks and that type of thing, but there is also man-made structure of woodsball fields which consist of man-made castles, forts, walls, towers, tree houses and things of that nature. Now, speedball is the opposite. It's usually very flat, open, ground and there's man-made barriers for hiding behind. These air bunkers, which are inflatable barriers to hide behind are used in speedball fields. Now for the basics of paintball, what you'll need is paintball marker, barrel cover, mask and a tank. Now, for this, there are several different types of guns. One type is your basic mechanical marker and then there is electronic markers. Also, when playing paintball, you'll probably need a hopper. There are two different types of hoppers. There is gravity-fed hoppers and electronic hoppers. Difference is that one is battery-operated and one is not. The electronic hopper feeds paintballs faster for an electronic gun. Electronic guns have a higher rate of fire, therefore they need a quicker hopper that actually forces the paintballs down in them, whereas a gravity hopper would work on your more basic markers. On a gravity-fed hopper, the paintballs just roll into the breech of the gun as they're fired for a slower rate of fire than electronic hopper. Also, for tanks, there's several different types of tanks. There's CO2 tank and there's compressed air tanks. Now we'll be going at safety equipment with paintball. Now, it's important with paintball that you always play at certified sides with certified professionals and also all the safety will not be covered in this clip. It's hard to demonstrate all the safety in paintball through a video clip. So, given that, we're going to go with basic safety equipment. First, you have mask. Paintball mask is very important. You need to wear a mask at all times when doing any paintball activity. It's important, that's to protect your eyes from getting hit by a paintball. Paintballs move at 200 or 300 feet per second most of the time, which is pretty fast and definitely dangerous if it hits you in the face. That's why a mask is so important. The next thing we have is a barrel cover. Barrel covers are important. Barrel cover looks like this. It just is basically sleeved if it's over the end of the paintball barrel. This is important because if you're in a safety area or an area where you don't want to fire paintball gun. This goes over the end of your barrel and keeps the paintball from coming out of the barrel and in someone's face or wherever you don't want it to go. So, barrel cover should be on your gun anytime you're not actually shooting your paintball gun. So, barrel covers even your storing guns or modeling guns or demonstrating guns, barrel covers should be on your gun like you see on table. Now, the only things you really need for paintball safety wise is a barrel cover and a mask, but if you want extra protection, you also have other things such as knee pads, elbow pads, neck protector and chest protection. The basic paintball clothes you'll need are some type of pants you normally wear outside like jeans or BDU pants or cargo pants, shoes, we're going to go more in to that in a second, and maybe an old shirt. Paintballs themselves don't normally stay in your clothes, but you do want to stay on the side of what you should wear in the woods is what you should wear on a paintball field due to their being natural, thorn bushes or poison ivy or something of that nature. So, now we're going to go over shoes. Some fields, if it's an indoor field, they probably don't want you to wear cleats, but you should check their website or something and make sure ahead of time or even call. Some fields don't want you to wear cleats, just because it might damage the surface or the bunkers themselves. Then the other thing is, other fields would want you to wear cleats, because it may have a slick surface. So, it's really important you do check that ahead of time with the field that you're going to play out. If it's an outdoor field, chances are, they've got a woodsball field and you're going to need to wear boots or some type of hiking shoes. Most injuries in paintball are probably due to trips and falls, so your shoes are actually pretty important. So, that's the basics of paintball. Let's get started!