About a mile or two down the road on the left side , and I remember this like it was yesterday , I saw a huge parking lot with 100 or so people walking around dressed in camo and holding what looked like guns . I made a U-turn , and the 15 or so cars behind me did the same . We pulled into the parking lot of what I later found out was Skirmish USA . This was a Saturday morning . We all got out of our cars , chatted with the players who were getting ready to board the bus to the fields and found out what this game was about . All 30 of us signed up to play the next morning . It was one of the most amazing experiences of my life .
What was the moment you knew you were in love with it ?
Probably the gun safety briefing [ laughs ]. It ’ s been nearly 40 years since that first day of paintball for me and I still remember every moment of it . I remember shooting the guns at the trash can cover targets ; I remember the posters everywhere warning of the dangers of removing your goggles ; I remember getting shot in the face at point-blank range , with no mask , only goggles ; I remember the first game we played that day … I didn ’ t fire a single shot ; and I remember the last game we played that day . The ref explained that he was going to hide the flag somewhere on this small field , with just a small piece of it sticking out of wherever it was hidden . The goal of the game was simply to find the flag , which I later did . Skirmish had this cool tradition that if you hung the flag , or in this case , find the flag , you got to keep it as a souvenir . We played 10 games that day with around 200 players and finding that last flag gave me three flags for the day .
So , to answer the question , I think I knew after finding and getting to keep that third flag . I felt like I was a natural at the game and I absolutely loved it . On the bus ride back to the Skirmish parking lot at the end of the day I said to one of my good friends , “ I ’ m going to leave the family business and find a way to do this game full time as a business .” True story .
Describe your journey through the past four decades with the sport ?
Oh , okay [ laughs ]. From that first day at Skirmish I spent the next four years playing every weekend . I also spent those four years learning and planning to open a paintball field , which I did in 1989 in Virginia . I left my family business that I had been working in since I was 14 years old , so this was a super scary moment for me . I had a
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