Intro - History of the Mounds Fields
Although we covered a bit about the Iron
City Classic’s roots in last year’s issue, it
seems almost impossible to cover this event
again and not do the same. The success
of this event is partly because it’s a great,
well-run, fun event hosted, promoted and
run by great people—the mounds fields
as they’ve been known as for more than 20
years are an undeniable part of the game’s
history—and I don’t think I am overstating
it.
In its fourth season since the league’s
inception in 1993/1994, the National
Professional Paintball League (NPPL)
introduced a new location to its yearly five-
event pro/am paintball tour. The field was
Urban Assault in McDonald, Pennsylvania,
about half an hour from Pittsburgh,
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Pennsylvania. Like all other NPPL event
fields in 1996 Urban Assault had plenty of
woods for setting up the ten-man fields.
But with the help of Smart Parts (NPPL
partners and promoters at the time) a new
open field concept was introduced which
would later be best known as “the mounds
fields.”
The mounds fields were very different to
play as this was at a time when all other
ten-man tournament ball was played in the
woods. The mounds fields were designed
with each team’s half of the field a mirror
image of the other, which of course
became the standard later in 1996 when
Chicago Badlandz introduced Hyperball
and Adrenaline Games/Millennium Series
rolled out airball fields, also in 1996.