PaintballX3 Magazine January 2015 | Page 8

8 From the Prez issue 76 1/2015 Welcome Ten Things I Wish We Could Do Over, Part 3 of 5 1. Navarone was truly one of 2. In the early to mid 2000s the great paintball teams of all time. For a two to three year period Navarone dominated the tournament paintball world with their two great squads. And even after their dominance wained they were still a top ten team for many more years, even though they decided to keep their equipment “low tech” while the rest of the top level teams were upgrading to constant air and other performance additions and upgrades. If we could do it all over again I wish we would have taken thousands of photos and hours of footage of Navarone. I wish we would have known we were witnessing paintball history as we watched this team win event after event. Sadly there are very few photos of Navarone, not much video and their impressive tournament win total has not even been accurately documented. I definitely wish we had a do-over on this one. January 2015 the paintball industry spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to get paintball events televised. The were regular ESPN shows, an NPPL Fox Sports show (an other Fox paintball shows), Paintball 2Xtremes’ weekly Spike TV show, the Smart Parts World Championships shown weekly and many others. The hope of the industry was to have more eyes see this great game of paintball so the game could grow. In the end the ratings were pretty good in some cases but not many “new eyes” saw the shows. By mid2000 most everyone already hear of, played or knew something about paintball. The extra exposure never really grew the game. But it did take a huge sum of money from it. Thanks for reading!