Paintball Media Magazine August 2020 August 2020 | Page 56

Photo By John Amodea
The Classic Movement
When woodsball, mechanical ball and ten
and seven-man paintball were about dead
and buried, Tom Cole, former Captain of Bad
Company of Maryland, kept the genre alive
with his Ultimate Woodsball League (UWL)
events. As the world of competitive tournament
paintball was moving to smaller fields, fasterfiring
gun, short games, coaching, airball fields,
buzzers, grandstands and glitz and glam, the
ULW was the only real choice for those that
wanted to play classic style paintball. And then
in 2017 Tim Montressor (#RIP40) resurrected
the mounds fields at Urban Assault Paintball
near Pittsburgh, creating the Iron City Classic
(ICC), a throwback standalone event that
harkens back to the mid-1990s NPPL days. The
event sold out immediately, as did the next
two before Tim’s tragic passing earlier this year,
causing the 2020 ICC to be cancelled.
Thanks mostly to Tom and Tim classic paintball
is alive and well as we move into the third
decade of the 2000s. In fact, it is so alive that
local fields and promoters are running classic
events around the world. One such promoter,
Will Arroyo teamed up with Top Gun Paintball
near Jackson, New Jersey this July to host the
King of the Mounds Seven-Man tournament.
The amateur-only King of the Mounds event
saw teams travel in from New York, New Jersey
056 paintball.media magazine