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Just like Mr Miyagi taught Daniel, you have to realize that only hard work and practice will make you a winner in the finals. So scrub up your crane stance and wax on wax off with PGi's second helping of X-Ball mastery...
How many times have you or a teammate come off the field after a point or a game and said, "Man, we coulda won that game if only…" and the ‘if only’ is invariably something you didn't do, that in retrospect might have made all the difference. Or worse, you knew it during the game and you still didn’t act. Why didn't you? Hesitation, over-thinking or uncertainty is the usual answer…but those aren’t answers, they’re excuses.
Instead of focusing on a fresh element of X-Ball play this month, let’s look at ways to put a fine edge on your skills, in part by making your drills more effective. More importantly, I’m gonna tell you how to get the most out of you and your teammates in any Paintballin’ situation. Oh sure, everyone says they know they need to practice more or do more drills or whatever, yet nine out of 10 times they don’t really mean it. It’s easy to say the right things or parrot what somebody else says - but be honest, it’s just talk unless you are seriously prepared to act. So tell me, do you really mean it? How good do you want to be?
I have gotten to the point where I almost despair of offering players advice even when they ask for it, because I know most of the time they don’t really want to know unless they harbor the futile hope that I’m gonna tell them the Magic Paintball Fairy will visit them in their sleep and give them the powers of Ollie if they leave a ham sandwich and a can of Coke on the back porch during a full moon. The truth is the secret to quality Paintball is the secret to pretty much everything else – the harder you’re willing to work the better you’ll get. Not exactly The Mystery of the Pyramids, is it?
Okay, you really are serious and you are prepared to work, but you’ve been told – and would like to believe – that the true secret to superior play is scrimmaging against superior players. This can be very useful but frequently isn’t because most players aren’t sufficiently self-aware to recognize the lessons there to be learned. But playing Paintball to get better sure is a lot more fun than practicing skills or running drills and if you can tell yourself at the same time that it’s the thing to do, it’s a win-win situation.
Except it really isn’t. It’s just another form of self-delusion that keeps you comfortable and happy until you realize you haven’t gotten better and don’t know why. What most players don’t understand when they watch the sport’s superstars perform is the rock solid foundation of fundamental skills that underlie those performances. The paradox is you want to be like the stars you watch but you’re short-changing yourself when it comes to the boring, hard and tedious stuff that help make the brilliant moves and incredible shots possible. It may even seem like you’re confining yourself with rules and procedures, boring routines and endless repetition, but you aren’t. You are giving yourself the necessary tools of the trade. The full measure of your potential and your talent can’t shine through and make you the superstar you want to be without the basic tools.
Since my focus is on X-Ball, if you’re prepared to listen up I’m prepared to tell you what it’s gonna take to play, what skills you gotta bring to the table to make a difference. Oh, sure, I know, you already play X-Ball, and you’ve seen the videos and read the articles. You’ve got it all figured out. Next stop, Pro-ball. Right now, right this second, odds are you don’t have a clue. I don’t suggest that as a put-down or to be arrogant. I say that because any player, at any level, in any sport who isn’t open to learning isn’t going to reach their potential.
So Grasshopper, let’s begin with the skills. The following isn’t a comprehensive list but is designed to focus on the principle X-Ball priorities; accuracy, sweet-spotting, running and shooting, gun-fighting, lane control, snap-shooting and diving and sliding. We’ll toss in positional awareness too because we're nice like that.
I’m starting with accuracy because in my experience this is uniformly the weakest skill in the average arsenal and affects many of the others. Most players associate accuracy with snap-shooting, and rightly so, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Effective sweet-spotting, running and shooting and gun-fighting all require accuracy. Simple shot making when you’ve gained a positional advantage requires accuracy and if you’ve watched much Paintball, you’ve no doubt seen example after example of a player getting into position to eliminate an unaware player and then missing the shot. When a player misses that shot it alters the rest of that game or point for his/her team. That shot must be made. And, yes, I know paintballs aren’t the perfect ballistic missile but I’m not interested in excuses - and you shouldn’t be either.
Accuracy drills revolve around hitting targets. D’oh! Kind of a no-brainer, I know. Start with relatively large targets because, trust me, you’ll need larger ones to feel like you’re accomplishing anything when you first start. Plastic gallon jugs are good. It’s important to mix up the distances to simulate real game condition shots and it’s critically important to also simulate a game phase in taking the shot. Here’s what I mean: the accuracy portion of our sweet-spotting drills sets up a target at the height and distance to mark a typical shooting lane. The drill begins as a game on begins, with the countdown to the horn. Shooters turn and shoot one ball at the horn. If it isn’t on target they follow the trajectory and make the necessary adjustment, following up with more shots until they are on target. Then they do it again. And again. The goal is to be on target from the first ball out of the barrel and to repeat it enough times in enough of the varied situations you encounter in a game so that eventually your body knows precisely how to accomplish this without you having to think much about it.
Another accuracy drill I like is to move and immediately shoot. This simulates the situation where you make a move either knowing or expecting to have acquired a shooting angle by making the bump. Sometimes the other team is unaware, sometimes they aren’t. It doesn’t matter because the faster you can deliver an accurate shot the greater the likelihood is that you'll get the elimination.
The drill begins with a move and as the player is sliding into the new position he/she is setting up to take a shot. There are ways of mixing this drill up, such as left and right-handed shots, standing and kneeling shots, or you can include incoming paint on the target shooter to force proper posture and tight play. You can also expose the target for a limited period of time from the moment the shooter begins moving so that if they take too long to take the shot the target is out of sight. Over time you reduce the size of the targets used in your assorted accuracy drills; from the gallon jugs down to targets the size of a hopper or partially exposed goggles or paint pots.
Using accuracy drills to begin a series of related drills, such as running and shooting practices, helps keep the focus on the important aspect of running and shooting, which is to be able to hit something while you’re running, not simply spray paint around the field wildly. This is the secret to effective running and shooting. When you begin, run slower, or walk even, but be on target. Use accuracy as the standard you do not deviate from and use the running and shooting drills to develop more speed over time. Regardless, it’s better to move slower and shoot accurately than the other way around, in which case you might as well simply run and forget about shooting.
We’ll save a comprehensive set of example drills for all the skills listed for another time, but that’s okay because there aren’t any magic drills and the important thing is how you organize your practice days and your frame of mind as you practice. The critical concepts to keep in mind when planning out a drills session are progressiveness and game phase simulation. What I mean by this is that your drills should be sequential so that they lead from one to the next, from the simple to the complex. So over, say, a morning’s set of drills, your main focus remains the same but your drills take you from basic mastery of the simple skill through a variety of direct applications of that skill in game situations. It’s one thing to be able to hit a target consistently and another to be able to eliminate a player during a game while other players are trying to eliminate you. So the idea is to work on mastering the skill and then applying it in real game situations.
All well and good, but so far we’re still only going through the motions. Yes, you’ll benefit from simply doing drills but you won’t tap into yours or your teammates real potential if that’s all you do. You need a routine that holds each player accountable and demands excellence. You need tough drills that cannot be mastered in a couple of sessions. You can’t, for example, simply run and shoot and figure that this is sufficient practice because you can physically manage it. It’s not.
The minimum requirement is that you put effective paint on a specific target or targets while you run, with either hand and in any direction you may need to move during a game. Anything less and you’re wasting paint. Of course no one achieves that level of skill right from the get go, but that is the basic goal. Not the ultimate goal, the fundamental goal. Yes, it’s going to take time and supreme effort but if you aim for less, less is what you’ll get.
We’re making progress but there’s more. It’s time to add an element of competition and consequences. The average player - and I don’t mean average skill-wise, I mean average in mental make-up and motivation – needs help pushing themselves beyond their self-imposed limitations. (And, yes, almost everyone limits themselves in different ways and it’s hard to overcome because most of the time you’re unaware of it. For example, I know a Pro player who insists on shooting only with his dominant hand. You see, he’s been doing it one way for so long that changing now would be admitting he has something to learn. And I know another Pro who can only play to his potential if he plays within his comfort zone yet complains he’s only asked to perform one dimensional tasks.) Make every drill, every aspect of practice a competition and reward success and punish failure.
For a particular practice day divide the team up; for an X-Ball team it can be by the lines they play on. The object is to turn even the basic drills into a competition so that each player must perform in order not to let his side down. And it isn’t a real competition unless there are consequences for winning and losing. The consequences needn’t be a big deal, just enough so the players want to win and don’t want to lose. Bragging rights alone is often enough motivation. I like to keep it simple; immediate consequences so that over the course of a day there are lots of ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ and the next phase of practice is another opportunity to come out on top. Losers run sprints and/or carry or clean the winners’ guns and gear. Losers are in charge of taking the field down on Sunday. Winners order first at dinner. The consequences aren’t important except that they separate winning from losing.
Here’s how it works: In one of our standard sweet-spotting drills we put four players at each end of the field in the game on position and simulate a game start. The outside pair run to the corners while the inside pair turn and shoot a sweet-spotting lane. Everyone in that group rotates one position over each time so that all four players at each end perform each of the drill’s functions, which encompasses running to both corners and shooting both left and right-hand lanes. We keep score. Make your corner, get a point. Eliminate their runner, get a point. At the end of the drill one group wins, the rest lose and suffer the consequences. Then we move on and it starts again.
The end result is everyone tries harder, everyone helps push everyone else to be better and you build into the process some of the same pressures that exist in tournament competition when the scores count and the pressure is really on. You will also discover a new depth to the camaraderie of your team. Your shared commitment and determination are on display and the shared ups and downs within the team accelerate the process that Paintball players call gelling - truly becoming a team in fact and not in name only.
So then, don’t accept anything less than your best and then try harder. Don’t accept anything less from your teammates either. Don’t just attend practice and run your drills. Going through the motions takes you only so far. Focus on your purpose. On your ultimate goals. As Yogi Berra should have said, if he didn’t; Paintball is 50% physical and 90% mental. A truly demanding regimen forces you to exceed your self-imposed limitations. But this is only the start. At this point you are only beginning to lay a proper foundation. Take your practice beyond skills and drills, push yourself and each other, and work hard. Another time we’ll dig deeper into the psychology of the successful competitor and the intangibles that elevate the good player to superstar status. In the meantime keep building your foundation and work harder. And remember to enjoy it.
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Practice Makes Perfect
